Must-Read

Jonathan Alter in Newsweek yesterday posted a scathing criticism of the NSA snooping incident, which, despite Darth Cheney's ludicrous assertions (and various right-wingers' spinning and excuse-making) is clearly illegal on the face of it. Alter makes the case that Dubya tried his best to kill the story in the New York Times, calling in publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office to try to arm-twist convince them not to publish. One would have to assume that he knew ahead of time how poorly this story would be received, and just how deep was the shit in which he has been caught standing.

As to the Republican noise machine lining up solidly behind Preznit I Spy, this particular case demonstrates more clearly than ever the bankruptcy of their position -- they don't come out in favor of the law or the Constitution, or of America, or of its citizens, but instead are working tirelessly only to defend their party and its Dear Leader from all attackers. The hypocrisy in their rabid, partisan ideology has never been more nakedly on display than it is now, in this case, where the president has very clearly violated the law and the Constitution, and yet they are defending him at every turn. They twist and turn logic in an attempt to justify his criminal actions until it is nearly unrecognizable; it is, as Steely Dan once titled it, pretzel-logic. They should be careful with that. Had they any sense of history, they'd remember that pretzels are dangerous to this president.

Here is just some of what Alter has to say:

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

(Emphasis mine.)

Another angle (and thanks to Chuck Dupree in the comments to an earlier post for the link) comes from emptywheel at The Next Hurrah, where it is suggested that the whole affair was a mass data-mining scheme involving large numbers of people at once, and thus too difficult for those doing the spying to get the necessary warrants. Intriguing. Check it out.