Sucker Trick

By Chip Pitts
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 07 February 2006

Listening to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on warrantless domestic surveillance, I kept thinking about President Bush's recent statement in Kansas that we're in a "magical moment in the history of liberty." With rapidly vanishing freedoms at home matching the shrinking prospects for freedom abroad, it is indeed as though we're stuck in a perverse black magic show. This "magical thinking" could rival Joan Didion's award-winning memoir using that phrase, but it's looking more like James Frey's fiction than a fact-based account. Where's Oprah when we need her?

The prestidigitation of the AG (the "Amazing Gonzales") was on full display during the hearings, ranging from magic words and distracting patter to smoke-and-mirrors misdirection.

The opening illusion, a reliable old standby, cynically invoked the tragedy of 9/11 to the usual devastating effect. The drapes parted slightly, and the Great Svengali himself, Karl Rove, could be seen pulling the national security cards out of his sleeves. Look here! War on Terror! And suddenly, people were asking whether the president had enough powers to protect us from terrorists, instead of sticking to the subject of whether he must comply with law when doing so.

What about the clear language of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), requiring a warrant from a secret court as the only means of legal domestic surveillance? Abracadabra - and it fades away in a fog of old court cases allowing warrantless surveillance, even though they pre-dated FISA's enactment thirty years ago!

Following in rapid succession were equally extraordinary effects. There was an incredible display of telepathy combined with a sort of alchemy: Gonzales read the minds of Congress to determine that they intended to give the president domestic spying powers in the Authorization to Use Military Force enacted shortly after 9/11 - even though the members of Congress themselves (including Republican senators like DeWine, Brownback, and Graham) had no idea they had such intent, and in fact refused to expand the authorization with the words "within the United States" as the administration had requested! All the more mind-blowing since, as Senator Arlen Specter said, it's quite hard for the AG to claim that Congress intended to give him the authority when he also says he approached Congress and was told he would be turned down.

Next was the astounding transformation of this fat domestic spying program into a slim "Terrorist Surveillance Program." This trick had been used before, when John Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness" program was changed in 2003 into the "Terrorist Information Awareness" system before quietly transmuting into separate classified programs hidden among various other federal agencies. This sleight of hand again seemed to stupefy the audience.

Despite the numerous revelations in the press and from top administration officials (like Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff) that "thousands" of Americans have been monitored, President Bush and his team have managed to persuade a slim majority of Americans that only true al Qaeda terrorists and affiliates are being spied on. Yet Senator Diane Feinstein wasn't taken in, telling the AG: "I cannot understand why you didn't come to the committee unless the program was much broader and you believed it would not be authorized ... I can only believe ... that this program is much bigger and much broader than you want anyone to know."

So when officials repeatedly avoid answering the question of whether innocent Americans, peace activists, and dissenters are monitored, and when they carefully say "this program" targets only al Qaeda, remember Gonzales's response to Feinstein, that he "can't talk about aspects beyond what the president has confirmed." The existence of datamining and more troubling surveillance was also apparent from his refusal to give assurances that innocent Americans weren't listened to, and his admission that dissenting former Justice Department lawyers who departed were most concerned about matters "other than the program about which I'm here to testify today." Presto Change-O!

Having fooled so many of the people so much of the time, it's not surprising to see President Bush and his company of conjurers continue to test reality and claim boundless powers. Admittedly, more people are asking what's behind the curtain. Senators of both parties have noted that accepting the president's views would allow torture, home searches without probable cause, and other invasions of rights literally without limit.

By contrast, a more focused program that truly targets al Qaeda members and includes external checks and balances would make us safer, by reducing all those useless leads that have been produced, and by restoring confidence in the rule of law that distinguishes us from the rule of force favored by terrorists.

But both parties also seem to be taken in by a glittering fantasy. This is the hope that more powerful laws, rather than more effective and competent exercise of existing expansive legal powers, will plug the holes in our security and make us forever safe from terrorism.

That could be the charlatans' greatest trick of all: leading us to rely on the secret FISA court and an expanded Patriot Act as illusory guarantees of liberty while they pull a disappearing act on what remains of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

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Chip Pitts is Board President of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, www.bordc.org.