As we’ve seen in his botched handling of
everything from the Iraqi occupation to the Katrina disaster, George W.
Bush is not much of a president. But let’s give credit where
it’s due — Bush has been a heck of a performer in two areas:
spying and lying. Both have come to the fore with
the recent revelation that Bush has secretly and unilaterally been using
the National Security Agency to spy on U.S. citizens. He has done so
illegally, not bothering to get a judicial warrant for his eavesdropping on
untold numbers of our phone calls and e-mails, as required by the
Constitution and the law. Caught spying on us, Bush then shifted to lying to
us. His most dangerous whopper is the claim that only bad guys are spied on
— that is, those Americans who’ve been talking to al Qaeda
operatives abroad. To the contrary, Bush’s spy program is nowhere
near this focused or competent. Instead, NSA has been making wholesale
sweeps of domestic communications, then using crude computer searches to
finger thousands of “terrorist suspects.” The FBI now admits
that virtually all of these secret taps have involved innocent Americans. One guy whom the Bushites claimed to have caught in
their unconstitutional terrorist net turned out to be a crackpot who wanted
to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. We hardly need to wreck
our Constitution just to nab kooks like this one. In fact, the FBI now
concedes that the spy program had nothing to do with catching this guy. Bush says that folks need to trust him to do the
right thing. Ours is a government based not on trusting some officials but
on holding all officials accountable to the rule of the law.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.
