Billmon:
It appears the "terrorist surveillance program" has undergone a bit of mission creep. And it's not Ross who needs a bunch of disposable cellphones -- Big Brother already knows who he is -- but his sources.
That "creep" reference was actually a lame attempt at a pun. Watergate buffs probably recall the origin and history of the original Plumbers Unit, created by the Nixon White House in 1971 to track down (and punish) Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. (I know this is all may be Greek to a lot of Gen-Xers, but bear with me here.)
The creation of the Plumbers Unit (officially: the White House Special Investigations Unit) was just one of a series of semi-legal or flat-out illegal steps taken by the Nixon cabal to investigate leaks of classified information. Others included the wiretapping of 11 of Henry Kissinger's top aides and four of their suspected journalistic contacts, and tapping the phone of Joseph Kraft -- one of the celebrity columnists of the day.
The original goal -- or at least, the stated goal -- of these efforts was to plug leaks. But the program quickly metastasized into an all-purpose domestic spying/political dirty tricks operation, beginning with the burglery of Ellberg's psychiatrist's office in an effort to find dirt that could be used to blackmail and/or discredit him. The entire operation was eventually transferred to CREEP (Nixon's 1972 reelection committee), where it generated an increasingly bizarre array of schemes [...]
This really has been remarkable. It's all out of a playbook we've seen before -- it's so Watergate, we don't really even need a new name for it.
One of the problems, of course, is that the more hardcore of the Nixonites never really learned anything -- or thought they had done anything wrong -- in Watergate or the penumbra of scandals that led to those final botched moments of a presidency. The actors of those times may have been met with press investigations, belated government investigations, and even jailtime, but the core of the Republican and conservative movements never quite repudiated Watergate; they simply looked upon those acts as unfortunate but understandable sins of enthusiasm.
And so as the Nixonites themselves moved on, continuing to show up in administration after administration and in the halls of what nowadays passes for punditry, the same behaviors followed them. Prominent among them are, of course, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Even the jailed G. Gordon Liddy himself was fully "rehabilitated", in that he is now a prominent conservative radio voice, and is a frequent vessel for conservative thought on Fox News and other bastions of nuttery.
The only error, Nixonites and their broad base of supporters determined, was getting caught. And so the difference between then and now is that this administration is even more secretive, using the War on Terror to claim preemptive legitimacy and secrecy over every action, no matter how absurd the supposed justification seems. They intend to circumvent the mistakes of the past. They don't intend to give any institution -- the Congress, the FISA court, the press -- the slightest hint of sunlight through which the new but familiar, ever-expanding "programs" can be illuminated.
This is all part and parcel, of course, of the notion of the Imperial Presidency or Unitary Executive or whatever other absurd name we or they or John Yoo or anyone else cares to give to the silly and monarchial notion that the president is above laws or petty Constitutional concerns. It was believed in the Nixon administration; it was believed in the Reagan administration; it was believed in the Bush administration; it is believed now. Of course, and hilariously, any half-birthed glimmer of the same notion was fought bitterly in the Clinton years -- would have been unthinkable, in the Clinton years -- because there's no actual philosophical tenet of conservatism at work here. It is just the more crass, primal conservative gut notion that you have the right and imperative to do something illegal if you've got a good shot of getting away with it. The sin is in not trying... or in getting caught.
From Liddy to Libby, from Limbaugh to DeLay to Abramoff to Tobin to Rove, laws are very fungible things, and you can count on an entire establishment of conservative hacks and true believers to rise up in bitter opposition to the notion that someone would dare try to find out about your illegal acts, or even worse that some leaker, somewhere, would expose them. A mere thirty minute exposure to Fox News demonstrates perfectly the phenomenon of Republicanism: the actual legality of an action is, to Republicans, irrelevant, and such concerns can be dismissed with no more concern than you would give to a passing street beggar. The real question, we are told, is who dared to expose it.
Billmon briefly notes the Plame affair, which in and of itself points to an almost eerily Nixonesque mindset in the White House (at least on Cheney's desk): quick to lash out against enemies and not nearly as quick to ponder the implications of the act. The premise of now targeting "leakers" by monitoring the press -- or targeting the press by monitoring leakers? -- is chilling, and given the bitterness and vindictiveness with which this administration has publicly attacked even the most petty of perceived disloyalties, it is decidedly unclear what the definition of supposed "leaker" actually is. I expect, as at this point a very wide range of administration observers do, that the next revelation will be that the definition of leaker is very broad indeed -- a list consisting almost entirely of perceived political threats to the administration's claims and agendas. I also expect, despite the iron curtains of secrecy that this administration finds absolutely necessary to carry out every action, we will soon find out.