Author: Pericles

I offer my letter in today’s Boston Globe as an example of how to frame the warrantless wiretapping issue:

WHAT SCARED me most as I watched Alberto Gonzales’s testimony Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee was his refusal to recognize any limits on the president’s power. Senator Dianne Feinstein proposed several actions that the president might take — like suspending the Posse Comitatus Act that keeps the military separate from the police — and could not get Gonzales to admit that any of them would be illegal. He conceded only that Feinstein’s examples raised ”very, very difficult questions.” So I am not comforted by the attorney general’s assurance that the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program does not break the law. Given the law as he understands it, I shudder to imagine a program that he would consider illegal.
DOUG MUDER
Nashua

Analysis in the extended.
The first line links together the words scared, limits, and president’s power. So the subtext is: “Unlimited power is scary. The president is claiming unlimited power.” I think it’s important to refer to “the president” rather than “Bush”. To a lot of Americans, Bush is a harmless good-old-boy — who could be afraid of him? But the presidency is a powerful office. It could be occupied by anybody and has been occupied by manipulative people like Nixon and LBJ. What we particularly don’t want to do in this context is demean Bush in any of the usual ways. If he’s an ignorant frat-boy, he’s not a threat to dominate the world.

Feinstein’s examples make the point: “We don’t know what they’ll do next.” This is key. The administration wants us to look at each encroachment in isolation and say “What’s the big deal? Why are the liberals getting all bent out of shape about that? It must be partisan politics.” Large numbers of people in red-state America have never made an international call, so the warrantless wiretapping program seems as distant as the Moon to them. In isolation the program does not threaten them. But if it is part of a pattern of accumulating power in the presidency with no limits … that is scary.

Also, getting military, and police into the same line is important. Nobody really likes the idea of military police. Nothing says “fascist” like military police. Gonzales’ “concession” that these are “very, very difficult questions” casts him as evasive and makes him look guilty. (Which is entirely fair, as you know if you watched his testimony. His entire tone was “There, there, don’t you worry your pretty little head.” while offering absolutely no substantive reassurance.)

The final two sentences continue the theme of fright — I go from “scared” in the first sentence to “not comforted” and “shudder” in the last two. Implicitly, I have said how Gonzales could have comforted me — by laying out the clear legal boundaries he sees around presidential power. This is important. It establishes that I am looking for something reasonable and not getting it. In other words, I’m not just a paranoid who is scared all the time regardless. Tone is important here. I’m sounding very reasonable and fact-oriented. The implicit message is: “Reasonable people are frightened by this.”

In the final image I invite the reader to imagine with me: What won’t they do? How far will they have to go before their consciences kick in? We need to keep asking questions like this because it shifts the battle to our turf. We’ve won if we can force the administration to start responding. Imagine if the headline were: “Gonzales denies plans for dictatorship”.

So, to sum up, here’s frame I think we should be using to talk about warrantless wiretapping: The president is accumulating power without limit. That’s scary. They could easily address our fears by telling us what the limits are, but they won’t. So we can only imagine what they ultimately have in mind.

Important words to keep repeating: power, unlimited, unchecked, scary. We need to get those words into articles that are factual and rational and don’t sound at all shrill. The tone should be reasonable — that helps send the scary words and images into the unconscious, where they can do the most good.

Over at Intel Dump, J. D. Henderson is doing very good analysis of the warrantless wiretapping issue. He’s careful to make the distinction between wiretapping the bad guys (which he’s for) and warrantless wiretapping (which he’s against, partly because nobody’s verifying that the targets really are bad guys). And he actually read the administration’s 42-page justification.

Intel Dump draws a fairly intelligent crowd, so the comments and trackbacks are worth looking at too, just to see how well-informed Bush supporters try to defend him. (As opposed to the usual terrorists-will-kill-us-all defense.)

But there’s one question that the Bush defenders just won’t answer …
Responding to the Bush-defending comments Cranky Observer asked:

Would the people who hold this view please give me 3 examples of things the President cannot do under this authority? Specifically, can the President (1) issue Bills of Attainder (2) wiretap, harass, jail, and/or torture (a) his political opponents (e.g. the Kerry Campaign) (b) his critics?

If not, why not?

No takers. He repeated the question further down the thread. No takers. I chimed in with

I’m still waiting for an answer to Cranky Observer’s question.

Nada.

This tells me it’s a pretty good question. I think we should throw it into any discussion we can. Under the administration’s interpretation of the Constitution, what can’t Bush do?

As I see it, the Constitution was written to balance two purposes: First, the Founders wanted to create a government strong enough to pursue the common good effectively. But second, they wanted to restrain that government from turning into a tyranny.

As students of history, they knew that democracy by itself doesn’t provide enough protection. Most of the time the voters try to elect trustworthy leaders, but sooner or later a popular demagogue comes along and sweeps democracy into the trash. (Hitler and the Weimar Republic, to give a more contemporary example.)

That’s why they constructed (in John Adams’ words) “a government of laws and not of men”. The system is supposed to have enough checks and balances to survive the occasional unscrupulous president. (Everyone recognizes the existence of unscrupulous presidents, even if we disagree about which ones they were/are.)

The big problem with Bush’s interpretation of the president’s “inherent power” as commander-in-chief is that it dismantles these checks and balances. In wartime — and given the vagueness of the War on Terror it’s going to be wartime from now on — the President can ignore any law that he determines infringes on his war-making ability.

So what can’t he do? How does this re-interpreted Constitution fulfill the Founders’ intention to protect us against tyranny? And don’t tell me that you trust President Bush — that’s a government of men, not of laws.

We need to keep coming back to this question, because I don’t think they have an answer. Keep asking it. Again. Again. And again.

[From the diaries by susanhu. This is very good and, as Marisacat says, “he did the dirty deed.” Thank you, Pericles. By the way, you have an amusing bio.]

I wasn’t sure what I would find when I started reading the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq that was released Wednesday. But I knew what I wouldn’t find: a timetable. Timetable has become a dirty word in the administration’s rhetoric recently – usually followed by words like surrender or cut and run.

Worse, in the last few months the meaning of timetable has expanded to include any measurable goal. In the administration’s rhetoric, whatever smacks of accountability is tantamount to surrender. Because the primary war they’ve been fighting isn’t the War on Terror; it’s the War on Accountability.

National Strategy surrenders nothing in this war. It predicts nothing specific or checkable, and provides no metrics that might be used in the future to judge whether the strategy is going well or badly. “No war has ever been won on a timetable,” it says. The most National Strategy will do is break things down into short, medium, and long term goals, like this nugget from the Executive Summary:

Victory in Iraq is Defined in Stages

• Short term, Iraq is making steady progress in fighting terrorists, meeting political milestones, building democratic institutions, and standing up security forces.
• Medium term, Iraq is in the lead defeating terrorists and providing its own security, with a fully constitutional government in place, and on its way to achieving its economic potential.
• Longer term, Iraq is peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.

Not even Saddam himself is against an Iraq that is “peaceful, united, stable, and secure” (as long as he’s running it), so who can argue with the Strategy‘s goals? But is “long term” three years? Five years? Fifty years? National Strategy makes a point of not saying.

Although we are confident of victory in Iraq, we will not put a date certain on when each stage of success will be reached. [original emphasis]

The Strategy is like a weatherman who, because he can’t predict the exact moment when the rain will stop, refuses to use any time factor at all. The sun will come out – sometime.

We’ve seen this behavior before. …
Prior to the Iraq invasion, the administration refused to estimate either the cost of the war or the number of troops that would be required to fight it – other than to attack the pessimistic predictions that other people made. (Optimistic projections, like “Iraq will pay for its own reconstruction,” typically drew no official comment.) Budget Director Mitch Daniels refused to make any estimate of what an invasion of Iraq might cost, other than to label Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey’s estimate of $200 billion as “the upper end of a hypothetical.” Similarly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that the number of troops that an occupation would require was “not knowable” and it “makes no sense to try” to estimate the war’s cost. He did, however, disparage Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s estimate of several hundred thousand troops as “far from the mark.” (We now know that Lindsey’s estimate was too low and Shinseki’s fairly accurate, but both were forced to leave the government.)

If National Strategy can’t predict, though, it has no problems making retrospective time judgments, like this one:

It is not realistic to expect a fully functioning democracy, able to defeat its enemies and peacefully reconcile generational grievances, to be in place less than three years after Saddam was finally removed from power.

The administration can get away with such tut-tutting precisely because it so successfully avoided accountability three years ago. But imagine if President Bush had made this statement before the invasion. Did he know then that the optimistic scenarios being discussed were “not realistic”? Which rosy possibilities envisioned today are equally unrealistic?

Maybe three years from now someone will tell us.

As the President’s defenders so often remind us, it’s easier to criticize than to suggest an alternative. But in this case, I know exactly the report I want: I want measurable goals, with some time estimates about when those goals might be achieved. No corporate CEO could hand his board a strategy without metrics and timetables; no American president should get away with it either.

When I annotated the Iraq speech Bush gave in October, I listed some statistics demonstrating that the reconstruction was going badly: Iraqi oil production and electrical production, both of which peaked in the summer of 2004. Equally appropriate statistics about the security situation should be easy to assemble: What if we broke Iraq into districts of equal population and regularly reported the number of districts that had gone a month without an insurgency-related death?
And of course, the death rate of our troops is the most revealing statistic of all. Consider these numbers, which you won’t find in National Strategy for Victory in Iraq:

US Soldiers Killed in Iraqi (average per month)

2003. 48.6 (starting in March)
2004. 70.7
2005. 70.8 (through November)

If National Strategy‘s optimistic scenarios of defeating the insurgency or handing the war off to the new Iraqi army hold any water, that number should start coming down. It hasn’t yet: 84 troops were killed in November, and ten more reported today.

Rather than hard numbers like these, National Strategy offers us well-packaged fluff.

Many of these reports with detailed metrics are released to the public, and are readily accessible. For example:

• Gains in training Iraqi security forces are updated weekly at www.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil;
• Improvements in the economy and infrastructure are collected weekly by the State Department (www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/iraqstatus/) as well as USAID, which continually updates its many ongoing programs and initiatives in Iraq (www.usaid.gov/iraq);
• Extensive reports are also made every three months to Congress, and are accessible at the State (www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/2207/) and Defense (www.defenselink.mil/pubs/) Department websites.

Americans can read and assess these reports to get a better sense of what is being done in Iraq and the progress being made on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Which sounds great, until you actually go to those web sites. Propaganda is such an ugly word, so let’s just say they’re booster sites. If something good happened today, you’ll hear about it; if something bad happened, you won’t. (That’s exactly what National Strategy promised, right? The sites track “gains” and “improvements”.) The most recent headlines on MNSTCI are about a tank parade put on by the 9th Iraqi Army division to show off their new NATO-donated equipment, and a drill run by the 23rd Squadron of the Iraqi Air Force. The U.S. AID site will tell you about all the wonderful reconstruction projects they’re working on. Are those projects ahead or behind schedule? You don’t need to know that. Were last week’s projects blown up by terrorists or sold for scrap by corrupt Iraqi bureaucrats? You don’t need to know that, either. National Strategy thinks you need happy stories, not consistent measurements objectively tracked.

Such statistics as you will find in National Strategy are cherry-picked. The report tells you, for example, that oil production was higher in 2004 than 2003 (when our invasion shut down everything for several months). But it slides past the fact that monthly production peaked in September, 2004. And there are now, you will be overjoyed to hear, over three million cell phones in Iraq. (Victory!)

Happy-talk like this is easy when you don’t identify the key statistics ahead of time. The Soviets never lacked for evidence that the current five-year plan was succeeding, because with hindsight you can always find something that has improved. But the only way to chart real progress is by metrics picked in advance.

If victory in Iraq is even possible, it will come in measurable steps: American casualties will go down; Iraqi civilian casualties will go down; unemployment will go down; electrical production and oil production will go up. A real strategy for victory would identify such key variables and set goals for them. And there would be timetables.

Lots of timetables.

When President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, he said that he knew her heart. That recommendation is her only real qualification: She has no judicial experience, no academic experience in constitutional law, and no meaningful writings not covered by attorney/client privilege.

“Heart” might strike you as a strange qualification. No one, after all, chooses a brain surgeon, an airline pilot, or a clean-up hitter solely on the basis of “heart”. Why a Supreme Court justice? Who would think that training and experience are not necessary?

There’s an answer to this question, but the professional pundits don’t seem to know it: In the worldview of fundamentalist religion, texts interpret themselves. Expertise just gets in the way.
You can see this principle most clearly with regard to the Bible. Conservative Christians have been fighting a war against academic Biblical scholarship since Spinoza published his Theological/Political Treatise in 1670. (In America, the struggle goes back to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.) In order to understand the Bible, a modern fundamentalist does not need to know ancient languages, ancient history, or any method of textual criticism. All that stuff just clouds the issue, because (even in the King James translation) the Bible just says what it says. You don’t need to interpret it, you should just read it literally.

Now, it only takes a few seconds of thought to see that this view is nonsense. For example, the author of The Gospel According to John is clearly making some kind of metaphor when he writes: “In the beginning was the Word.” And interpreted literally, the parables of Jesus are not very interesting. (Who really cares what happens when a sower goes out to sow his seed anyway?)

But this is exactly the kind of academic reasoning that puts a mote in the eye of faith. To grasp the Bible’s meaning, a fundamentalist doesn’t need to get a degree in Biblical Studies, she just needs to read the text and let it speak directly to her heart. If she has a good heart – one that is not muddled by vices like intellectual pride – she’ll see the truth.

This is a familiar argument to fundamentalists, and it easily makes the transition from religion to law. The sin of the so-called “liberal activist judges” is that they don’t read the Constitution literally. Like the Bible, the Constitution interprets itself. It says what it says. The “right to bear arms” means exactly that – and don’t confuse matters by inventing some artificial distinction between flintlock rifles and M-16s, or wondering what that phrase about “a well-regulated militia” is doing there. And if the phrase “right to privacy” isn’t in the Constitution, end of story. You can’t read it if it isn’t there. Using the Ninth Amendment to argue in favor of “implied rights” (like the right to breathe air, for example – another omission of the Founders), is just liberal sophistry.

In short, a good fundamentalist judge doesn’t need any education beyond the simple ability to read. Training in legal interpretation is actually a bad thing, because it gives you intellectual pride. It tempts you to think you know better than the Founders, and to read things into the text that aren’t really there.

So don’t give us some Harvard-educated genius with a long list of publications in academic journals.

Just give us a woman with a good heart.