[lbo-talk] Safire on wiretapping by the N.S.A.

Leigh Meyers leighcmeyers at gmail.com
Sun Jan 1 09:44:58 PST 2006



>From NBC Meet The Press January 01 2006

<...> MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to President Bush, the war in Iraq and the extraordinary year that he has been dealing with. This was the speech in the Oval Office on December 18th of 2005. Let's watch.

(Videotape, December 18, 2005):

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: And we remember the words of the Christmas carol written during the Civil War: "God is not dead, nor does he sleep; the wrong shall fail, the right prevail with peace on Earth, goodwill to men."

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Doris Kearns Goodwin, were you surprised that the president invoked the Civil War?

MS. GOODWIN: No, not really, because I think his larger invocation was the idea of right and wrong, courage to do the right, and that God somehow, it seems he suggests, is on the side of the right. I think the contrast was that Abraham Lincoln would say, "We have to figure out what God wants; that's what we don't know. God has his purposes out there, but it's the difficulty of man to know what it is." And he was much more willing to say, as he did in the second inaugural, "Both sides in this war read the same Bible, pray to the same God. Both have invoked his aid against the other. Neither's prayers have been fully answered." So I think it's a complicated thing when you think that God's out there definitely on your side, rather than saying, "We got to figure out what the right thing is in a democratic country together."

MR. RUSSERT: Bill Safire.

MR. SAFIRE: I would completely agree with Doris on that.

MS. GOODWIN: Yea!

MR. SAFIRE: Lincoln--well, let's come back to Iraq. Let me establish my bona fides before I start criticizing the president for anything. I think this is a noble effort that we're in. I think extending democracy is one of the things that this country is dedicated to, and I think we can actually change the course of history by turning things around in the Middle East. And so that's where I stand on--were we lied to or all that stuff, I push aside and I say we're doing the right thing. Now, go ahead, ask about dissent and wiretapping and like that.

MR. RUSSERT: Go ahead.

MR. SAFIRE: OK. I have a thing about wiretapping.

MS. GOODWIN: A personal thing.

MR. SAFIRE: I was writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president looks at it and says, "OK, I'll go with it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we'll get something in the paper." And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, "Hey, you want a leak? I'll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform." And he took it down and wrote a little story about it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so they hear a White House speechwriter say, "Hey, you want a leak?" And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn't like that. And when it finally broke--it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I was on the right side--but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home--you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my--everything.

So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what's happening now is that the--as a result of that scandal back in the '70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.

MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA.

MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows them down and makes them think for a minute. It doesn't slow them down as much as the president has made out to believe, because there's a wrinkle in it saying that if it's a real emergency and you have to get this information, then you can get it and get the approval within 72 hours afterwards. So there's always this struggle in a war between liberty and security. Doris, you go into that in your book, and Lincoln did, indeed, suspend habeas corpus, but there it is in the Constitution, "It shall not be suspended except in invasion or a rebellion," so he had the right to. He didn't have the right, I think, to close the Brooklyn Eagle or see the arrest of the leading dissident, Vanlandingham, and he made some mistakes.

But just as FDR later made a mistake with the eight saboteurs and hanged them all, and just as we made a terrible mistake with the Japanese-Americans in World War II and have apologized for that. During wartime, we have this excess of security and afterwards we apologize. And that's why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can't seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I'm with the critics on that.

MR. RUSSERT: Jon?

MR. MEACHAM: Well, it often depends on who wins and what purpose it's used for. It's exactly right. We're in a predictable cycle now where war--emergency breaks out, presidents have an almost irresistible urge to grab as much power as they can, for understandable biographical and human reasons. They want to protect the country. Then there will be a reaction after the crisis has passed a bit. You get congressional committees involved, you get the press involved, and then there is a reform that they drive through, the next president drives through the next time.

There can be moments where executive power is a good thing; for instance, the summer of 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt decided to send destroyers to Churchill's Britain. He did it basically by himself, and we remember what he used in the press conference announcing that he was going to send the destroyers without approval of Congress was, he said, "This is the biggest thing that we've done since the Louisiana Purchase," which Jefferson had done without bothering to call Congress. So fighting Hitler, executive power, good; tapping Bill Safire, bad. But I do think that we have to make sure Congress, in a way, is more engaged here. That's--to me, Congress has been missing in action the past four years. <...>

In Full @: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10558586/

-- Leigh leighcmeyers at gmail.com http://www.leighm.net http://leighmdotnet.blogspot.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list