Your Civil Liberties Are Safe
BY JAMES TARANTO
Best of the Web Today
Monday, May 15, 2006
From yesterday's New York Times:
<<< In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.
But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.
The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. >>>
We don't know enough to have an opinion on the merits of this outcome, but the process ought to reassure anyone who is worried about civil liberties. Here we had a debate within the government, apparently very soon after 9/11, which the civil-liberties side won.
The anti-Bush crowd will doubtless sound alarms over the position Cheney took, even though it didn't prevail. And let us stipulate, without getting into the particulars of this case, that overzealousness about preventing terrorism could lead to genuine infringements of civil liberties.
Even so, an administration that is overzealous, tempered by a bureaucracy that is more cautious, strikes us as an excellent arrangement. Think about it: Would you vote for a presidential candidate who promised to be less zealous about preventing another 9/11?
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