Yesterday, 18 House Dems released a letter to the president calling for an independent counsel to investigate whether the administration’s warrantless-search program is consistent with the law. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, put it, “If the effort to prevent vigorous and appropriate investigation succeeds, we fear the inexorable conclusion will be that these executive branch agencies hold themselves above the law and accountable to no one.”
Yesterday, the White House responded publicly. Not surprisingly, the Bush gang wasn’t exactly moved by the recommendation.
The White House on Monday rejected the call by several House Democrats for a special counsel to investigate the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program.
“I think that where these Democrats who are calling for this ought to spend their time is on what was the source of the unauthorized disclosure of this vital and critical program in the war on terrorism,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “I really don’t think there is any basis for a special counsel…. But the fact that this information was disclosed about the existence of this program has given the enemy some of our playbook.”
I doubt any serious person expected the administration to respond favorably to the letter from the 18 Dems, but I still found McClellan’s response rather annoying for two reasons.
First, McClellan may have missed it, but that “playbook” argument pretty much came to an official end a few weeks ago, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that that the administration “assume[s] that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance,” but officials hope that the terrorists “sometimes forget.”
Second, the “blame the whistleblowers” argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny either.
When the government does not want the public to know what it is doing, it often cites national security as the reason for secrecy. The nation’s safety is obviously a most serious issue, but that very fact has caused this administration and many others to use it as a catchall for any matter it wants to keep secret, even if the underlying reason for the secrecy is to prevent embarrassment to the White House. The White House has yet to show that national security was harmed by the report on electronic spying, which did not reveal the existence of such surveillance — only how it was being done in a way that seems outside the law.
You can tell the NSA controversy has faded from the headlines a bit; McClellan hasn’t felt the need to come up with any new talking points lately.