One bomb away

A stock character of bad spy thrillers is the villainous government bureaucrat whose fetish for power and control vastly outweighs national security concerns. You’ll find this sort of character rubbing his hands with glee whenever there’s an excuse for declaring martial law, or bombing another country for the sake of rallying the country behind a faltering chief executive. Burt Lancaster played to this type in Seven Days In May, a Cold War movie about a MacArthur-like general quietly engineering a coup against the President.

In the real world, you don’t find many of these people, and they don’t normally get a chance to use governmental power to advance their perverse ends. National security bureaucrats have to at least maintain the appearance of working in the country’s interests. If the Dark Side takes them over, there are normally plenty of laws and regulations, not to mention simple bureaucratic inertia, to thwart any evil plots.

It’s startling, therefore, to read about people whose moral and political priorities are so out of whack that they see a terrorist attack as being politically useful. That’s why we’re probably going to read the following quote from Jack Goldsmith’s new book:

[Goldsmith] shared the White House's concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists. But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.

Here’s another revealing passage, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald of Salon:

In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: "They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," he writes.

If you’re shocked, please go now to the restroom, take a good look in the mirror, and slap yourself in the face. Goldsmith adds another detail to the Bruegel-esque portrait of the Bush Administration, a collection of narrow-minded burghers partying through the wreckage of the American political system.

You should not be surprised to hear that they have been deliberately ignoring or contravening established laws and procedures to see if anyone would actually enforce them. There are, of course, two steps to the law, making it and applying it.

You should not excuse them because “9/11 changed everything,” or they say that they had the best interests of the country in mind. In the real world, no villain ever says, “You got me, copper, I had no good reason for committing that crime.”

You should not ignore the results of these policies. There isn’t any “Whoops” in national security. Politics is the realm of results, and the laws and procedures that people like Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, and others worked very, very hard to wreck instead of fix existed for a very good reason, the results they produced. The former lottery commissioner of Texas, his allies, and his employees decided that the rules designed to ensure accountability, protect Constitutional liberties, and more effectively deal with threats to the United States should be felled, root and branch.

The results? The Al Qaeda of 2007 is nothing like the Al Qaeda of 2001, but it is still a potential threat. We need the cooperation of other countries to fight trans-national terrorists, but we enjoy less international cooperation than we did before the 9/11 attacks.  The extreme secrecy of the Administration has allowed a string of bad decisions, of which the Iraq occupation is only the most conspicuous, to be made without review or challenge. Americans have no idea how significant the terrorist threat to them might be.

However secretly the decisions were made, the challenges to the existing national security procedures and institutions happened in plain sight. The traditional counterweights to Presidential power, the Congress and the press, shrugged when they should have questioned.

If the “one bomb” exploded today, who would oppose further steps the Administration might take? Law requires both passage and execution. Politics requires both opinion and action. Turn off the eleventeenth presidential debate, turn on CSPAN, and hear what your representatives are doing to prevent other mistakes. If they’re not doing what you think they should, take your lunch hour to visit their offices, in person, to tell them what you think.

Comments

[Mikey in Plano]

Aaaaah, "simple bureaucratic inertia."

Back in the early '90s, I read Seymour Hersh's The Price Of Power. Besides filling in my knowledge of the Nixon administration's misdeeds leading up to the Watergate scandal, the book showed me how useful bureaucracies are in swatting down the worst ideas.

Say you'd like to bomb Cambodia. All it takes is one faceless hack in the State Department to kick it back with a departmentalized version of "This is a stupid fucking idea" attached to it to nix it.

At least until you decide to run it through the NSC and National Security Advisor's office.

I'm starting to get nostalgic for the days you were forced to run your bad, unconstitutional policies through a shadow government.