Something to Hide

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted January 4, 2006.

On Sunday, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called for a Senate Committee investigation into the National Security Agency's secret wiretapping program. But instead of peering into the secrets behind the potentially illegal -- and potentially impeachable -- executive office spying, Republican officials made the Sunday talk show rounds excoriating the whistleblowers as the real threat to our security.

When Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whether there was any chance that the Senate would put new limits on the president's powers, McConnell replied:

Well, we'll certainly take a look at that, but thank goodness the Justice Department is investigating to find out who has been endangering our national security by leaking this information so that our enemies now have a greater sense of what our techniques are in going after terrorists.

Even as the discussion has shifted from the spying itself to whomever revealed the spying, the New York Times' public editor Byron Calame got stonewalled in his search for the reasons behind the Times' yearlong delay in publishing the story. In his latest column, he writes, "For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making."

Calame submitted a list of 28 questions to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger, and says that the silence from the top offices was deafening. All Calame could get from Keller was this: "There is really no way to have a full discussion of the back story without talking about when and how we knew what we knew, and we can't do that."

The Times' obfuscation on the issue -- as well as the new Republican emphasis on hunting down the whistleblowers -- hinges on the assumption that new and vital information was leaked about our country's strategies in the "war on terror." According to White House spokesman Trent Duffy, "The leaking of classified information is a serious issue. The fact is that Al Qaeda's playbook is not printed on Page 1 -- and when America's is, it has serious ramifications."

But if you google Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), you can read all about how warrantless wiretaps have been legally conducted since 1978. FISA allows for immediate warrantless electronic surveillance as long as a warrant is sought within 72 hours. Anyone who wanted to know that the administration was capable of this, could. And anyone who didn't arguably doesn't pose much of a threat to the U.S.

And the FISA courts have historically been anything but stringent with executive-branch wiretap requests. According to a UPI report, of the nearly 19,000 search warrants requested by presidents since 1978, only 181 have been modified, and all but two of those changes occured during George W. Bush's administration. It seems that the normally lenient FISA court had some substantial doubts about this president's requests.

Tellingly, a few days after the Times published the secret wiretap story, one of the 11 judges on the FISA court resigned. According to James Robertson's colleagues, he was worried that information obtained through the secret wiretaps was then used to obtain warrants through the FISA court.

And yet, the recent hubbub is not over an investigation into the president's excruciatingly flawed legal reasoning in conducting the wiretaps. Rather, a judicial probe is being launched to find out who the whistleblowers were in the leak. The probe will not be led by an independent special prosecutor (as in the Valerie Plame case) but by Justice Department officials who will be reporting to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial fellow at AlterNet.

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