Cheney on domestic eavesdropping isn't as crazy as you think
Friday, January 6, 2006 at 6:18AM ■"Cheney Cites Justifications for Domestic Eavesdropping: Secret Monitoring May Have Averted 9/11, He Says," by Jim VandeHei and Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 5 January 2006, p. A2.
Cheney makes reference to NSA intercepts of comms inside the U.S. among the 9/11 hijackers, in effect arguing that if the government had more freedom to monitor such comms inside the U.S., it would have connected some dots and possibly prevented the attacks.
Noted terrorist expert Bruce Hoffman is quoted in the piece saying that's a bit too simple and that our national security system's failures were more systematic, so no silver bullet here.
But the larger point implied by Cheney remains: there's a weird hole in our system if we basically give terrorists a free pass once they get inside our borders. Clearly, allowing for such domestic surveillance is a risky venture, one that should be subject to all sorts of judicial oversight, something Cheney is definitely not fond of. But just as clearly, this notion of "home" versus "away" game is awfully artificial: this idea that we can be as brutal and extra-legal as we want overseas while playing an ultra-fair version within our borders.
The more we cling to that chimera at home, the more we'll drive our government toward "illegal" and immoral strategies abroad. We will not extend rule sets, we'll just perpetuate an us-versus-them divide that simply will not serve us well in this war.
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