Lee's Political Opinion

LeRoy Goldman
The Shadow Knows

Published: Sunday, June 16, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.

The arrogance of Obama's dragnet

As if the recent revelations about Benghazi, Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative organizations, the Justice Department's secret subpoenas of Associated Press phone records, and the secret search warrant it used to obtain the private emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen were not enough, there's more.

Now The Washington Post and the British paper The Guardian have disclosed that the Obama administration obtained a secret court order requiring Verizon to divulge information to federal counterterrorism agencies about all of the telephone calls on its network.

The Post and the Guardian have also reported that the super-secret National Security Agency has collected information from at least nine United States Internet servers, including Google, Facebook and Apple.

Any one of these revelations would be sufficient to cause the Obama administration to resort to damage control mode. But the coincidence of all of this happening at the same time amounts to something that no administration ever wishes to confront — losing the confidence of the American public. Once lost, it can't be restored. Once lost, it's curtains for the administration.

Don't be fooled by the apparent business as usual behavior at the White House and in the puzzle palaces that line the Potomac. To use lingo from the Pentagon, they've gone to DEFCON 1.

As Philip Ewing recently reported on Politico.com, the NSA urged the government to "rethink" the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution in a classified memo written in 2001 and later declassified and released by George Washington University. The memo urges the United States to re-evaluate its approach to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and the protections the Fourth Amendment provides against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, a part of the Bill of Rights, guards against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires that any warrant be judicially sanctioned and supported by reasonable cause.

The NSA memo goes on to state that "senior leadership must understand that today's and tomorrow's mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected' communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries." There can be little doubt that the recent revelations concerning the NSA's phone-tracking operation and its Internet monitoring program rely upon the "rethinking" that the NSA called for in 2001.

Now it's vital to understand that the dual necessities of protecting our liberty and being adequately prepared to defeat international terrorism are complicated and not black and white. The problem is that these issues are being decided in secret by the government.

That all of this constitutes a clear and present danger to the American public and to the Obama administration is manifested in two editorials published in The New York Times and Washington Post on June 6. We all know the political sympathies and editorial bent of The Times and The Post — Democratic, liberal and pro-Barack Obama. Thus, what they say here is of great significance as well as damaging to the Obama administration.

Under the Patriot Act, the government is authorized to seek secret court orders to obtain "business records" from phone companies connected to a terrorism investigation. But it appears that now the NSA has expanded that definition to include all customers of a phone company like Verizon. The Post opines, "If the program is so extensive and there are two layers of court review, why couldn't the American people know about this process before now?"

The Post also challenged the effectiveness of the program. It said, "In the days after the Boston bombings, many asked why the government didn't connect the dots on the Tsarnaev brothers. Now many are asking why the government wants so much information about so many Americans."

The Times editorial was far harsher. It opened by stating that "the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching ... . Those reassurances have never been persuasive." Furthermore, it states, "Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it."

The Times argues that the administration believes that, without suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who we call, from what phone and for how long. The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., defended the administration, but the Times called her defense "absurd."

It also takes the president to task for doing the same thing that in 2007 he criticized the Bush administration for: "putting forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide."

The Times stated, "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue." And it quotes Jim Sensenbrenner, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, who now says, "Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."

President Obama and his administration are on thin ice. They would do well to remember what happened after Walter Cronkite's broadcast on Feb. 27, 1968, on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson saw it and said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

A month later, Johnson stunned the nation by saying he would not seek re-election. A few months later, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was ripped apart by violence over the war. And that November, Richard Nixon was elected president only to ultimately be destroyed by his arrogant contempt of the rule of law.

The Shadow's resorted to communicating by smoke signals, but Goldman can be reached at: EmailMe