I'm not a lawyer (yet), but I do know a few things about how innocent people act vs. how guilty people act.
If you're innocent, you try your best to appear legitimate and clear your name through all of the necessary and proper channels -you might be upset or insulted that you're a suspect, but on the whole you're eager to show the proper authorities (though maybe not the general public, if you like your privacy) that you're doing the right thing.
If you're guilty, though, you try to hide things - you tell half-truths and you mislead people about what you've been up to. You'll feign insult at being accused, and your first reaction is to undercut the credibility of your accuser. Instead of going through the proper channels to clear you're name you try to stall inquiries into the matter and prevent people from discovering the truth.
When it comes to the NSA spying scandal, I think it's very clear which of these two categories describes the Bush Administration. If what they were doing was legitimate, then they would've handled themselves differently from day #1 and they would be handling themselves differently today. But what they were doing through the NSA wasn't legitimate, so I think it's important not only to lay out the case for why I think this is so blindingly obvious, but also to offer an explanation of what exactly was so illegitimate about their activities.
To begin with, the areas of the law they're operating in are, at best, very grey. Under these circumstances, anyone with good intentions would look to Congress to update the laws governing surveillance in order to make sure they were on the proper side of any legal battles that might come up in the future. This is particularly true when Congress has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to bend over backwards to deliver anything the President wants.
If the NSA spying programs that have been revealed recently were really being conducted with the intention of tracking down terrorists, then the administration could've gone to Congress in the days after 9/11 and asked them to pass whatever laws were needed to make these programs legal. At that moment, and at every moment since then thanks to Republicans, there was literally NOTHING that the President could've have asked for and not gotten. But he didn't go to Congress to ask for anything - instead, he chose to act in secret.
There's just no legitimate justification for the administration to be operating in the grey areas of the law like this. The only plausible reason for them to avoid oversight from an already servile Congress is if they're up to something really sinister and illegal. Our only logical conclusion is that the Bush Administration is hiding something underneath the veil of these programs, and they chose to circumvent the charade of Congressional oversight to prevent it from being exposed.
Several Kossacks have suggested that the real purpose of these programs is to track and spy on domestic political opponents. And I'm inclined to agree with them - but not because the specifics of the programs or the targets of the spying necessarily lead to that conclusion. No, I'm inclined to agree because my gut tells me Karl Rove would never pass up the opportunity.
He's a political animal and nothing more, so having the technology to spy on liberals and Democrats on this scale had to have been a wet dream of his. He was the President's most trusted advisor, the architect of all White House policy, and he had the highest security clearances. He could do whatever he wanted and nobody would question it. With the capability and the motivation, plus the confidence that he would never be caught, what on Earth would stop the man from doing it?
Always remember: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or, more bluntly: He did it.
Ask yourselves this: why else would the Bush Administration be going to such great lengths to prevent oversight of these programs now? If what they're doing is really legitimate, then they could easily get Justice Department lawyers the security clearances necessary to certify that everything is indeed above board - this is the same Justice Department whose lawyers gave the thumbs up to torture. But they're desperate to prevent anyone from seeing what's been going on backstage, so they're doing everything they can to kill perfectly reasonable oversight activities.
The writing on the wall could not be clearer: they have something to hide, and they're willing to go down in flames to prevent it from being exposed.
What else could it be but a KGB-style domestic spying operation? Maybe I've made a mistake in my analysis, but to the casual observer it looks like they've done something VERY wrong - and given the people who're involved, the activities they've been engaged in, and the range of possible uses for the information they've collected, this seems like the most plausible explanation for what's been happening and why the White House is so desperate to keep us in the dark.
Like I said at the outset: if these programs really are being used to track and catch terrorists, there were numerous things the Bush Administration could've done differently before and would be doing differently now in order to make their case to us. But because their surveillance program was aimed at domestic political opponents, they had no choice but to tell half-truths, mislead us about the extent of their operation, assail the credibility of their accusers, and try to kill any inquiry into what they've been up to.
Bill Maher alluded to this Friday night during an interview with John Gibson, and I think it bears additional contemplation: the right-wing news and radio hosts may say all kinds of crazy things about liberals and Democrats being in league with Al Qaeda, but that doesn't make it legitimate for the NSA to spy on us under the guise of fighting terror.
I've had enough of this shit.