WASHINGTON – As more Republican senators called for hearings on his administration’s freewheeling wiretapping policies, President Bush this week offered a public explanation of how the strategy worked.
The problem was that what he said didn’t make sense and wasn’t actually true.
Aside from that, the administration’s bold defense goes forward.
The president explained several times that the recently revealed National Security Agency wiretapping – untouched by judicial approval – was “limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States.”
Many of the president’s comments on the subject have produced dismay, but this one stirred mostly head scratching: Why did it make sense to monitor only calls from outside the country coming in and not calls from inside the country going out?
Well, the White House staff immediately clarified: It didn’t make sense, and that wasn’t how the program worked.
You could think this was just a matter of the president getting confused, or getting his tongue twisted. But as this administration explains what it considers to be its rights and powers, words and their meaning get twisted like a sugar cruller.
The law’s actual language says that wiretapping in the United States requires a court order. But immediately after the warrantless wiretapping was revealed, Vice President Cheney explained that the new powers had been authorized by legislation passed by Congress immediately after Sept. 11, empowering the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons” responsible for the attacks.
Except at the time, nobody said that unauthorized wiretaps in the United States were part of the deal. Most members of Congress seemed to think they were approving war in Afghanistan.
“I can state categorically,” former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle wrote recently in The Washington Post, “that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up,” and nobody has so far remembered differently. The half-a-dozen Republican senators who have called for hearings on the administration’s wiretapping policy all voted for the bill and don’t seem to remember it saying that judges were no longer needed.
In fact, Daschle said, a specific administration request to add domestic powers to the bill was rejected.
Still, looking back, the Bush administration says the bill gave it the powers it wanted.
After all, it’s just words.
The strategy of rewriting history – or just rereading it – remains an administration favorite.
Last summer, to ward off an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., forbidding torture or debasing treatment of detainees in U.S. custody, the Bush administration had the entire military appropriations bill pulled off the Senate floor. In the fall, after the Senate passed the amendment 90-9, the vice president tried to get it blocked in the House, and then tried to get the language changed to exclude the CIA.
It all failed, and last week the president signed the bill with the amendment attached, but added his own reading of it:
“The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power.”
In other words, whatever the law now says, the executive branch won’t be putting down those electrodes any time soon.
Not only is it useless for Congress to try to tell the president what the law requires, but judges shouldn’t bother, either. Because it doesn’t matter who wrote the law but only how the president reads it.
So the policy is that if you want to know what the law is, don’t go to the Congress that wrote it, or to the judges whose job it is to interpret it, but just to the president, and he’ll explain it.
And then later on, the White House staff will explain what the president meant.
David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. Leonard Pitts’ column, which normally runs on Saturday, was not available.
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