Excerpt from transcript of Newt Gingrich's appearance on MTP yesterday:
MR. RUSSERT: Let’s go right to it. This is the headline that greeted our country on Thursday in USA Today: “The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA Today. ... This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews. ... For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made - across town or across the country - to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others. ... The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged.”
And this story, Mr. Speaker, led to this cover in Newsweek magazine, coming out tomorrow, a huge telephone receiver over the White House. Your reaction to this development?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, the amazing thing is—everything that has been done is totally legal. You just look at the, at the specifics of what they’re doing, it is totally legal. The real problem is the Bush administration refuses to come up front and explain it in advance. If you go to the American people and say, “We’re in a long war with the irreconcilable wing of Islam, there are people who want to kill millions of us, your government has to have an ability to track these people down, in the electronic age it has to be real time. Should the Congress guarantee that the United States government is capable of stopping terrorists, detecting terrorists and, if necessary, going back out and finding out who the terrorists worked with, once you know who the terrorists are? I bet this country’s 90 percent in favor of that, as long as there are protections against you as an innocent person having a U.S. attorney use that information for any purpose other than national security.
So, I think this administration, if they would come straight out on this, go right at the, the Senator Leahys of the world and say, “This is the choice. We’re going to have a nuclear weapon some day or a biological weapon that could kill millions of Americans. We have the technical ability to stop it. Now do you want us to be able to stop it or not?”
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MR. RUSSERT: But you’re not troubled with the government gathering data on phone calls made in this country by American citizens?
MR. GINGRICH: Look, if you find out one morning that we now have five terrorists in the U.S. who are part of an active network who want to destroy New York City or Buffalo or Atlanta, and the government says, “You know, we could’ve tracked every call they made for the last 10 years, but that would’ve been wrong, Tim. So we don’t know who they’ve been working with. We don’t know what their network is and we can’t stop it,” you’re then going to have a totally new set of congressional hearings by the same people who will then reverse their side, totally. I do think your civil liberties ought to be...(unintelligible). Nobody who’s not involved in terrorism should be at risk. Nobody who’s making normal phone calls should be at risk. But the idea that we’re going to say to the United States government, for libertarian reasons, “We’d rather lose a city than have you gather data,” I think is totally out of touch with the danger of the modern world. |
