Exactly How Bad Was The Domestic Spying Program Anyway?

I know you are probably bored with the entire Gonzales/Ashcroft Hospital Story, but if you watched the video you probably realize that the program Ashcroft and Comey refused to certify was so bad damn near everybody at the top of the Justice Department was willing to walk if the President didn't relent.

Paul Kiel over at TPMMuckraker has just published an anonymous, but an extraordinarily well written and knowledgeable comment from one of its readers providing us a lot of background and asking a lot of pointed questions. If the New York Times can republish anonymous sources we ought to be able to republish anonymous blog comments.

When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.

Never forget that it is now firmly established that the Administration has been running the DoJ as an arm of the Republican party. If we Americans don't get to the bottom of this story our very way of life could be at risk. Our mission, citizen journalists, is to legally find out and share all we can about the NSA's surveillance program or at least demand our Representatives and Senators investigate for and report to us.