By Mark Goldblatt on 5.16.06 @ 12:06AM
The latest cheap shot at Vice President Cheney.
According to Sunday's New York Times, Vice President
Dick Cheney argued that the National Security Agency should have
the power to wiretap domestic phone calls and intercept e-mails
without warrants in order to hunt down terrorists. This is actually
a non-story, a front page attempt to generate paranoia and cast the
Bush administration in a negative light; it amounts to the
"revelation" that in the weeks after 9/11 members of Bush's inner
circle debated how far the government could legally go in trying to
protect the American people.
Whoa, stop the presses!
The Times account mentions that NSA lawyers, more
familiar than Cheney was with the agency's strict rules against
domestic spying, argued that warrantless searches must be limited
to communications into and out of the country. That position is the
one that ultimately prevailed.
Though the story tells us more about anti-Bush bias at the
Times -- another non-revelation -- than it does about
national security, there are at least two inadvertent lessons to be
gleaned from the coverage:
1) The Bush administration is not a monolith. Mainstream media
outlets often depict President Bush trapped inside an intellectual
bubble, surrounded by maniacal schemers and yes men. But the debate
over the limits of domestic surveillance provides a more realistic
glimpse into Bush's decision-making process: The question was what
measures the government could take, under the current law, to
enhance national security without irreparably undermining civil
liberties. Bush heard out Cheney on the subject; he also heard out
the NSA pros. In the end, he went with the advice of the NSA
pros.
2) Dick Cheney is not running the country. After six retired
generals recently called for the resignation of Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, mainstream media outlets ridiculed
President Bush's plainspoken response: "I'm the decider. I decide
what's best." But that appears to be exactly the case. Bush calls
the shots in the White House. He thought Cheney's suggestion of
wiretapping domestic calls and e-mails went too far, so he nixed
it. End of conversation.
The editorial board of the Times has yet to grasp the
fact that America is at war with Islamofascism. President Bush and
his cabinet have grasped it and are grappling with its
implications. For their efforts, they'll continue to be savaged by
the Times on the slightest pretext. But history has a way
of sorting things out. Stories like last Sunday's will redound to
the newspaper's infamy, not the President's.
Mark Goldblatt teaches at the Fashion Institute of
Technology of the State University of New York (MGold57@aol.com).
topics:
Mainstream Media, Islam, Law, Fascism
