Updated twice below

Bob Geiger asks some questions that have been begging themselves into existence since December.

What should make it even easier on Bush’s anti-Constitution crew is that, according to what they tell us, they already have half of their riddle solved. Given Team Bush’s assertion that they’re only spying on people talking to known terrorists, a logical conclusion is that they already know who’s on one half of the phone calls snooped — which means, with today’s technology, they should be mighty close to nailing themselves some real, live evildoers.

Which leads me to my questions that I’m hoping somebody in the White House or the NSA reads — if they didn’t get this post in transit — and can clear up this confusion, lest I be forced to believe they’re either lying or stupid:

* If you have already narrowed down who the terrorists are right down to the physical and logical addresses of their telephones or computers, why don’t you just go get them?

* Assuming you’re filtering through millions of phone calls and you already have them winnowed to bad guys and their possible confederates in the United States, where’s the results? I’m sure a political genius like Karl Rove would just love to shut us liberals the hell up by doing a perp walk — before his own, of course — with a really bad guy and being able to attribute the righteous bust to the “terrorist surveillance program.” Wouldn’t that be worth its weight in political gold? So where’s the prizes for all this concentrated effort?

* I know that many of us prickly Americans are absolutely obsessed with the whereabouts of the people who, well, you know, attacked us on September 11, but it’s been almost five years and Osama bin Laden is still running free and podcasting threats at us. Why is it that you still don’t have him in custody with a massive program like this in place?

* According to Senator Russ Feingold, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, al Qaeda is still operating in at least 60 countries, which is roughly the same as when we were attacked in 2001. If you’re doing all this spying and it’s targeted at known members of al Qaeda, why hasn’t that number gone down in almost five years?

* When you constantly say that our troops are “fighting for our freedom,” isn’t our government undermining the very freedoms our brave men and women are allegedly protecting?

Finally, there seems to be very little doubt that the White House has violated the law by spying on American citizens without warrants — according to the USA Today story yesterday, it may be up to 200 million of us, or two-thirds of the U.S. population — and I guess that leads to my final question.

How do we teach our children the value of obeying the law when the President of the United States sets such a horrible example?

Answers forthcoming? Not without recalling Alberto Gonzalez before the Senate, having him take an oath this time, and requiring him that he answer what he’s asked. Hayden’s confirmation hearings could likewise be useful in pushing for answers.

I frankly am shocked that so many Americans seem to approve of the telecos sharing their phone records with the NSA. It’s too soon to expect their to be full understanding of the issue — the poll conducting the same day the story broke. What has not seeped into national consciousness is that Bush has made every American a terror suspect. Everyone. Not just the Muslim or Arab immigrants. Not just those with criminal backgrounds. Not just those of us on the left who abhor this administration’s policies. Everyone.

This simple reality brings us to a point where we look around and cannot recognize the nation we live in. Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan author, wrote Upside Down in 1998. In one vignette he writes,

A Star Is Born?

In mid-1998, the White House put another villain up on the global marquee. He uses the stage name Osama bin Laden; he’s an Islamic fundamentalist, sports a beard, wears a turban, and caresses the rifle in his lap. Will this new star’s career take off? Will he be a box office hit? Will he manage to undermine the foundations of Western civilization or will he only play a supporting role? In horror movies, you never know. (page 121) [Emphasis added]

I look at my country today and I know bin Laden has become the excuse used to undermine our civilization. Our freedoms? Gone. Our rights? Gone. We cannot look at our government and know that our conversations are safe, know that they won’t be analyzed to find out if our dissent, our opinions make us 18% terrorist or 63% terrorist, just on who we talk to and what we think.

The curtain has been pulled back and the trust is gone. The trust is gone in both directions. We cannot trust our government because our government no longer trusts us.

American thinkers have always been wary of government power. Madison writes in Federalist No. 51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Our wariness of governmental abuse has taken a more profound, mundane turn. We are not yet afraid of jackbooted soldiers marching the streets of New York, taxing us beyond belief and repressing the interests of the people. Our fears now take the form of the total loss of privacy, the total denial of the our Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate ourselves, the knowledge that we can be whisked away to prison and held with no right of habeas corpus just for looking like or sharing the name of a terrorist. The hidden, nefarious actions of the Bush administration have created the justifications for fears that no sane person would ever have felt living inside the United States.

And yet here we are. Our government manifests behaviors reminiscent of the KGB and Pinochet’s Chile. I want to throw up my hands, to scream in disgust. I don’t know what the way back to America is because Bush has gotten us so lost. Let’s not waste time mourning - it’s time to organize. Demand accountability. Demand a Democratic response. Demand a Republican response!

Change will only come…sanity will only prevail…America will make herself right…when the public stands up and demands Bush and his administration be held accountable for their destruction.

Update

Georgia10, of note:

When the domestic spying program first broke, some Americans brushed it off, since it purportedly listened only to those suspected of terrorism. But what Americans need to understand is that this most recent disclosure means that every American is a potential terror suspect. Every. Single. One.

So the government monitors your calls. Every. Single. One. Day after day, month after month, year after year. Legal issues aside, the government’s actions mark a disturbing change (regression?) in the relationship between a citizen and its government. Where government is inherently established to protect its citizens, it is now operating to protect itself from them.

And so the government misled. It misled us to give us a false sense of security. As General Hayden said in 2002:

When I spoke with our workforce shortly after the September 11th attacks, I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security, and I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security. I then gave the NSA workforce a challenge: We were going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again.

Notice he said the government’s post 9/11 goal was to make us “feel” safe again. Not to implement real security–the type of security that is effective and targeted–but only to establish the mere sense of security, an illusion that we are safer today than in the days before 9/11. And the best way to manufacture this illusion of safety is to promise Americans that the government will hunt down every last terrorist–without telling us that we are all on the possible terrorist list.

Update 2

Defense Tech has enlisted expert opinion to point out that this sort of data collection just doesn’t work.

So I called Valdis Krebs, who’s considered by many to be the leading authority on social network analysis — the art and science of finding the important connections in a seemingly-impenetrable mass of data. His analysis of the social network surrounding the 9/11 hijackers is a classic in the field.

Here’s what Krebs had to say about the newly-revealed NSA program that aims to track “every call ever made”: “If you’re looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Certain people are more suspicious than others,” he adds. They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. “So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don’t have a cell. Because if one was there, you’d find some clustering. You don’t have to collect all the data in the world to do that.”

Deploying ineffective strategies is bad. When the target of the tactic is the entire American public, you’d think the US government would decide that it’s not one that works. Having the capacity to cast a huge net doesn’t necessitate using it. We are a nation of laws and we cannot let our government so decide that they will not follow them because a system makes itself available that might reveal greater results in our fight against terrorists. But as Geiger asked above, where are the results? Where is the proof that this program has had any effect in curtailing terrorism - the number of attacks more than tripled in the last year?

No, this program and the overarching strategies of the Bush administration are nothing more than an affront to America’s principles and a violation of the rights and expectations of the American people.