You have to hand it to the Republicans, they are obviously a literate and creative bunch. They've managed to take the frame work of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", the double-speak snippets of George Orwell's "1984" and weave it into a Tom Clancy-esque spy thriller. Unfortunately, as with nearly all conservative-minded creative endeavors, the product is the policy equivalent of "The Turner Diaries": a poorly written, paranoid hate-fiction meant to influence the feeble-minded into irrational acts of anti-Americanism.
More beyond the fold...
In this work of fiction, the President has the power to order the super-secret National Security Agency to spy on Americans because it makes us safer in the aftermath of 9/11. It's no secret that the Bush Administration used the attacks and the subsequent "terror alerts" for political gain, but this is an unprecedented power grab even for them. The terrorist strikes on Washington and New York have become the justification for virtually unlimited Presidential power, all in the supposed effort to protect our lives and liberties from the freedom-hating evil-doers. And in the opinion of the top legal minds of the Bush Administration, the bill of rights shouldn't stand in the President's way of protecting your freedom. Of course, the inherent contradiction is completely lost on the aforementioned legal minds and the "best and brightest" the GOP has to offer.
This is their argument in a NUTshell: Al Qaeda terrorists want to destroy our freedom. We can't allow Al Qaeda to again attack America. Our freedom allows Al Qaeda to attack America. Our freedom is an Al Qaeda weapon and it must be stopped. (Note the similarity in logic to Heller's "Catch-22")
From Wikipedia:
Within the book, "catch-22" is a military rule, the circular logic of which most notably prevents anyone from avoiding combat missions:
One may only be excused from flying bombing missions on the grounds of insanity;
One must assert one's insanity to be excused on this basis;
One who requests to be excused is presumably in fear for his life. This is taken to be proof of his sanity, and he is therefore obliged to continue flying missions;
One who is truly insane presumably would not make the request. He therefore would continue flying missions, even though as an insane person he could of course be excused from them simply by asking.
So, clearly the neocons aren't making this shit up, they're just stealing it.
The Administration says they are only spying on calls between people in the United States and those with "known links to Al Qaeda"overseas. Are these the same links that Saddam Hussein had with the bin Laden gang? That could be a question a judge might ask of an NSA agent applying for a warrant to tap such a call, if the Administration had bothered to actually go before a judge to get that permission. Of course by then, the terrorist would have already set off the doomsday bomb planted in your invalid grandmother's basement next door to the orphanage run by nuns, or so the Administration and their lock-stepped, talking-point-clutching, spin-monkeys would have you believe. Never mind that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act says our intrepid NSA superspy has 72 hours after actually violating an American's Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to get the judge to sign off on the warrant. That hasn't actually happened though because the Bush Administration, contrary to the law (which in most places means ILLEGAL), didn't feel it was necessary. I mean, you never see James Bond stopping to do paperwork after he's saved the world, right?
And we all know the Bush Administration's clever (Orwellian) use of names for their actions, like the "Healthy Forests" initiative (keeping forests healthy by killing the trees, flowers and animals) and the "Clear Skies" initiative (which CLEARS the skies of birds and clouds and oxygen by allowing factories to spew toxic chemicals like the "money shot" of your average XXX movie). But you might be surprised by the clever name for this NSA policy (because it actually means what it says), Freedom Assisted CounterIntelligence and Strategic Management, better known as: F.A.C.I.S.M.
P.S. As many of you familiar with Orwell might note, there is more that could be said about the similarities between our Global War on Terror and the Oceania/Eastasia/Eurasia war of "1984". As Wikipedia notes of the novel: the war cannot be won, and that its only purpose is to destroy the produce of human labor and maintain a constant death toll, thus keeping the totalitarian society intact. This is another riff for another time.