I agree that spying on our enemies is necessary, else we risk being caught off guard.
I believe that the guidelines and rules need to be discussed and set, out in the open. However, this is apparently not what the Bush administration did. They came up with their own rules, which many legal experts say have gone past their mandate and authority.
Now, the Bush administration will not discuss the details of their own guidelines because, they argue, it would compromise security. A completely circuitous, self enclosed argument. How can we have an intelligent debate and discussion of the pros and cons if the Bush administration will not provide the information necessary to make an appraisal of what is being done in the current program?
For example, if they are really just listening in on the conversations of suspected terrorists, most (me included) would agree that this would be prudent and responsible. However, reports are leaking that the program is not only listening to thousands of people, but causing the FBI to become overloaded with false leads. This may actually hurt our intelligence efforts. Are there really thousands of suspected terrorists that the FBI is tracking?
This opens the door to another issue: who is a terrorist? Someone who is Arab, from a country that has terrorist connections? Is racial profiling used to come up with this list of thousands of possible terrorists? We just learned that Al Qaeda was planning to use Southeast Asians in their LA plot, to thwart our simple-minded approach to terrorist tracking - proving they are not stupid, but we are?
You've hit on the very heart of the issue:
we can discuss the policies and guidelines of the legalities at the governance level, but we should not be exposing the details of classified operations to get at that discussion.
The Bush administration is so opaque that such a discussion is not possible. Unless, of course, the discussion is about a political opponent - then, apparently, they have no problem releasing classified information. |
