At his end-of-the-year press conference last week, the president hopes to set Americans’ minds at ease over his warrantless-search program by emphasizing the international aspect to it. “[I]f you’re calling from Houston to L.A.,” Bush said, “that call is not monitored.”
As it happens, that wasn’t actually true. Nevertheless, a reporter on hand for the press conference quickly followed up on the president’s response by taking his approach further, asking, “[W]hy not monitor those calls between Houston and L.A.? If the threat is so great, and you use the same logic, why not monitor those calls?”
Bush responded by pointing out that he would use FISA courts to monitor domestic calls if the need arose — which, again, wasn’t true — but this idea of taking Bush’s positions to their logical limit is a compelling thought experiment. Eugene Robinson explored this in more detail today.
The problem is that if the president really were determined to do anything it takes to prevent another terrorist strike, why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War? That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist’s uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted. Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency’s copious computers can hold?
Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn’t electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn’t really torture, and have at it.
If potential terrorists may be walking among us, why not have police officers stand on street corners all day and subject anyone who looks “suspicious” to questioning and a search? That’s what Fidel Castro does in Cuba, and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country.
In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them?
Given that the president seems willing to circumvent the law when he finds legal limits overly burdensome, Robinson’s questions are hardly unreasonable.