Preening for the cameras
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is scheduled to spend today in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee defending President Bush's foreign surveillance program. Democrats and selected Republicans on the committee get the opportunity to once again make fools out of themselves on C-SPAN.
Gonzales has once again taken to the nation's editorial pages -- this time in today's Wall Street Journal -- to explain to self-important senators of both parties, outraged civil libertarians and sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome just what is going on.
With the recent leak of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program, some have questioned whether this congressional authorization can be read to encompass signals intelligence. In this case, our military is engaged in signals intelligence when they have reason to believe that at least one person is a member or agent of al Qaeda or a related terrorist organization communicating into or out of the U.S. The purpose is to learn the locations, plans and capabilities of our enemy. Consider the facts from both a legal and a commonsense perspective.
The president, as commander in chief, has asserted his authority to use sophisticated military drones to search for Osama bin Laden, to deploy our armed forces in combat zones, and to kill or capture al Qaeda operatives around the world. No one would dispute that the AUMF supports the president in each of these actions.
It is, therefore, inconceivable that the AUMF does not also support the president's efforts to intercept the communications of our enemies. Any future al Qaeda attacks on the homeland are likely to be carried out, like Sept. 11, by operatives hiding among us. The NSA terrorist surveillance program is a military operation designed to detect them quickly. Efforts to identify the terrorists and their plans expeditiously while ensuring faithful adherence to the Constitution and our existing laws is precisely what America expects from the president.
And that's exactly what's been going on. And polls show that the majority of Americans understand and accept this. This is not a winning strategy for a one of them.
For those of you who are honestly questioning whether what the President is doing is legal, then I point you to these three posts by Andy McCarthy, a former U.S. Attorney, over at National Review's "The Corner." McCarthy demonstrates that many of the Democrat critics of the president's program were singing a different tune when Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office.
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