Once in a great while, something catches my eye to the extent that I feel the need to post about it. Unfortunately, I usually ignore that impulse, and completely forget that I had ever come across it. I never intended to include a whole lot of political discussion on my site, but it seems as though it’s one of the few things that actually interests me enough that I take the time to type out my thoughts. I was reading an article earlier today, published in the Washington Times, that takes on the debate over presidential powers. I don’t know why, but I really like reading articles that actually put things into context. One of the article’s quotes really struck me as a nice summation of the way I feel about the issue:
“When you compare the Bush administration and its response to the attacks of 9/11 to what previous presidents have done in wartime, I think the Bush administration has acted with a fair amount of restraint,” Mr. Yoo said. “The administration in a way has become a victim of its own success, because if there had been another 9/11, I think the demands for aggressive policies would be great.”
You know when a UC Berkeley professor defends a Republican administration — let alone the Bush administration — there’s going to be hell to pay. He’s probably strapped to a telephone pole right now, with a swastika painted on his forehead. But, I digress.
I find it much more troubling that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and that FDR wrangled up 120,000 Japanese/Japanese-Americans (62% of whom were American citizens) into “War Relocation Camps” during WWII. There are currently 300,000,000 Americans. We’re talking about an administration that authorized the wiretapping of dozens of citizens. Not millions, not thousands, not hundreds. Dozens. It wasn’t every single American citizen, as in the Civil War, and it wasn’t everyone who appeared to have certain physical characteristics, as in WWII — these were people that government agencies had identified as potential threats, directly after the worst terrorist attack on American soil. You can argue back and forth about the legality of the wiretaps, and there are legitimate arguments on both sides, but when the chips are down — as they were after 9/11 and they continue to be today — I’d gladly let my government compromise the privacy of 0.00000024% of the population (assuming 6 dozen people were wiretapped) if it means we have a lesser chance, as a country of three hundred million, to have to deal with anything like 9/11 ever again.
I’ll even go so far as to invite the NSA to include me in their surveillance, provided they can handle endless conversations about dogs, computers, and music without falling asleep. It’s the least I can do for my country.
So, the big question is, did the wiretapping prevent any terrorist activity? I don’t know that we’ll ever know for sure. However, as the quote from the article above states, if the administration hadn’t done this, and there had been attacks, you’d have demonstrators in the street asking why the president didn’t do what was necessary to protect the nation. And they’d be citing the decisive actions of Lincoln and Roosevelt as precedent.
