With the election season in full swing, it was only a matter of time before Karl Rove kicked the demagoguery up a notch.
Presidential adviser Karl Rove criticized a federal judge’s order for an immediate end to the government’s warrantless surveillance program, saying Wednesday such a program might have prevented the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Rove said the government should be free to listen if al Qaeda is calling someone within the U.S.
“Imagine if we could have done that before 9/11. It might have been a different outcome,” he said.
Truth be told, this isn’t exactly a new line of argument. Conservatives, almost immediately after the legally dubious program was exposed, argued that 9/11 might have been prevented if the government had conducted more illegal surveillance.
It isn’t an argument that’s improved with age.
Rove may have forgotten, but we didn’t need warrantless-searches to garner intelligence about the 9/11 attacks — intelligence officials used legal means to learn about the plot. Intercepted messages led the CIA to warn the president about Osama bin Laden shortly before the attacks, and on Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Agency picked up suggestive comments by al Queda operatives, including, “Tomorrow is zero hour.”
As it turns out, that communication wasn’t translated in time, but intelligence officials didn’t need to conduct illegal domestic surveillance; they needed more linguists.
Moreover, as Salon’s Tim Grieve noted, Rove neglected to mention that the president, based on the legal arguments advanced by the administration’s attorneys, could have ordered warrantless wiretapping before 9/11 if he’d had any interest in doing so.
While the Justice Department has argued that the use-of-force authorization approved by Congress just after 9/11 implicitly allowed the warrantless spying, it also insists that Bush had “inherent” authority to institute the program himself.
“The NSA activities are supported by the president’s well-recognized inherent constitutional authority as commander in chief and sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs to conduct warrantless surveillance of enemy forces for intelligence purposes to detect and disrupt armed attacks on the United States,” the Justice Department argued in its “white paper” in defense of the program. “The president has the chief responsibility under the Constitution to protect America from attack, and the Constitution gives the president the authority necessary to fulfill that solemn responsibility.”
Got that? The Justice Department says that even without Congress, Bush has the authority to order warrantless spying to “protect America from attack.” Rove says that there “might have been a different outcome” on 9/11 if he had done so. As another 9/11 anniversary approaches, we’ll take that as an admission that Bush didn’t, in fact, do everything he could to avoid the attacks. Either that, or Bush doesn’t actually have the inherent power to engage in warrantless spying without congressional approval. It’s got to be one or the other; the White House can’t — but probably will — have it both ways.
Of course, these facts notwithstanding, Rove’s drive-by smear isn’t about reality; it’s about arguing, with very little subtlety, that to oppose warrantless searches is to tacitly agree that civil liberties are more important than preventing 9/11-style attacks.
Be prepared to hear quite a bit of that between now and November.