{"id":6240,"date":"2006-01-03T15:36:16","date_gmt":"2006-01-03T20:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6240"},"modified":"2006-01-03T15:36:16","modified_gmt":"2006-01-03T20:36:16","slug":"he-could-tell-us-but-then-hed-have-to-kill-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/he-could-tell-us-but-then-hed-have-to-kill-us\/","title":{"rendered":"He could tell us, but then he’d have to kill us"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hate to criticize Scott McClellan two posts in a row — oh, who am I kidding — but there was another exchange in today’s briefing<\/a> that’s important. Indeed, it gave us a hint as to how the White House will deal with questions surrounding Bush’s warrantless-search program whenever queries get uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

Q: A number of members of Congress do not agree that the President has the authority to do what he did in that case.<\/p>\n

McClellan: Well, previous administrations have cited similar authority.<\/p>\n

Q: And they want to have hearings, and those hearings are supported by many on both sides, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, because they don’t believe that this is within the scope of the President’s authority.<\/p>\n

McClellan: And what’s your question?<\/p>\n

Q: And my question is, does the White House take this into account, will it try to talk to them, will it participate in the hearings?<\/p>\n

McClellan: Like I said, and the President has said we’ve briefed members of Congress on more than a dozen occasions.<\/p>\n

Q: But that’s not what they’re talking about.<\/p>\n

McClellan: And in terms of discussions about this, the President talked about this at his end-of-the-year news conference. We shouldn’t be talking about intelligence activities, particularly in a time of war, in a public way. This is a highly classified authorization —<\/p>\n

Q: Not anymore. I mean, it’s public now.<\/p>\n

McClellan: No, it still is. It still is highly classified. The President has talked in a very limited way about the nature of this authorization and what it’s designed to do, and how it’s limited.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s ample mendacity here — Bush’s recent predecessors did not<\/a> cite a similar authority, the congressional “briefings” McClellan cited were a joke<\/a>, etc. — but it’s that last point that’s particularly interesting. When the questions started getting a little more pointed, and McClellan didn’t want to repeat the exact same talking points for the umpteenth time, he rolled out the “we shouldn’t be talking about intelligence activities” talking point. Nevermind that he’d just spent 15 minutes talking about these intelligence activities; there’s a war going on and that would be irresponsible.<\/p>\n

That’s actually pretty clever. Someone has questions about the program? The White House will answer them, unless they’re too hard, in which case the program is “still highly classified.” What a convenient and selectively applied principle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate to criticize Scott McClellan two posts in a row — oh, who am I kidding — but there was another exchange in today’s briefing that’s important. Indeed, it gave us a hint as to how the White House will deal with questions surrounding Bush’s warrantless-search program whenever queries get uncomfortable. Q: A number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}