Bush endorses hearings on warrantless-searches – sort of

January 11, 2006

Behind the scenes, the White House hopes the Senate Judiciary Committee will forgo hearings on the president’s warrantless-search program. In fact, Time quoted a GOP official saying that the White House is “going to lean on Specter very hard not to hold hearings.”

In front of the cameras, however, Bush has a different story.

President Bush said Wednesday that congressional hearings to investigate his domestic eavesdropping program will be good for democracy as long as they don’t give secrets away to the enemy.

Bush was initially opposed to having the program investigated in a public format, but made it clear that he is resigned to open hearings that are scheduled to begin in coming weeks. […]

“There will be a lot of hearings to talk about that, but that’s good for democracy,” he said. “Just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I had the prerogative to make the decision I make, doesn’t tell the enemy what we’re doing. See, that’s the danger.”

I’m glad the president thinks this will be “good for democracy,” a description we can’t use to describe the White House’s tactics, because Bush doesn’t seem to have much of a choice in the matter. The White House can balk, but that won’t change the fact that Senate Dems and at least six Senate Republicans want substantive hearings that will question the legality of the president’s conduct.

I’m concerned, however, about Bush’s caveat — hearings are fine so long as they respect national security secrecy. Last week, Bush said a public hearing would “say to the enemy, ‘Here’s what they do — adjust.'” Scott McClellan said a public discussion of the program “harm[s] our national security.” A few days prior, deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said news about warrantless searches “has serious ramifications.”

In fact, if the press briefings are any indication, this could be problematic in the hearings. Administration officials will answer questions, until they get difficult and/or politically awkward, at which point the questions “undermine national security.”

“There will be a lot of hearings to talk about that, but that’s good for democracy,” he said. “Just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I had the prerogative to make the decision I make, doesn’t tell the enemy what we’re doing. See, that’s the danger.”

This makes total sense. For Bush the Democrats are the enemy.

  • Let’s pretend the NSA has finally perfected a 12 qubit quantum computer, and can now read any encrypted message with a key of 1024 or less. Most software today uses a 128 bit key encryption because nothing short of a quantum computer can break the code. All someone would have to do is use a larger encryption key to prevent the NSA from reading their email (in this hypothetical universe).

    Would we really want that type of information revealed in a Senate hearing?

    Clearly we should have hearings, but let’s be careful. Too much is at stake.

  • Couple of problems there Dan.

    First, we can list on and on the types of things that souldn’t be given out at public hearings. We don’t want to…let’s say, have names of operatives come out either in these hearings…oops. WH already did that.

    But there are tons of things we don’t want coming out. Tell me, in what context do you suppose the one you named WOULD EVER come out? These are hearings to determine if the president broke the law, and if so why, and if there was a compelling reason…none of that has to do with encryption. This is about getting warrants for taps.

    The other problem with your example…it assumed terrorists would use the lowest or standard available encryption, not state-of-the-art, if they had a choice. They can’t be crafty lurkers, and dumb at the same time. They have money to fund terror.

    This is as pointless as pretending they just talk as if in private in telephone conversations. Ridiculous. They talk in code, they don’t name names, I’m sure they talk like mafia folk do “you take care of that thing?” “what, the first thing?” “Yeah..the first thing, what, you think I meant the second thing?…no the FIRST thing” “yeah…all taken care of”..

    So I guess we can use key expressions like “thing” and catche them…eh?

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