Beating Big Brother With Constitutional Kryptonite

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

12 August 13

rying wolf rarely pays in the long run. Not for Aesop's little shepherd boy and his runaway sheep. Not for Washington's never ending war on terror. And not for those of us trying to build a progressive opposition that people can trust to rebuild a free and decent society. "Nobody believes a liar," as Aesop put it. "Even when he's telling the truth."

Lying outright is only part of our mystification. United States officials who shut down 22 embassies and consulates across North Africa and the Middle East might well have believed that al Qaeda was coming, just as many truthers believe what they say when they tell us unequivocally that al Qaeda never existed or was merely the creation of Dick Cheney, the CIA, and Mossad - the same bunch that staged or enabled the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and Twin Towers, as truthers see the world.

Subgroups along this immense ideological spectrum cherish their own special beliefs, their own way to frame significant questions, and - contrary to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's admonition - their own facts. They also, to their credit, poke well-deserved holes in the arguments of the others, whether in official U.S. government reports, the mainstream media, or best-selling books and widely viewed websites with alternative "truths."

Whatever our political leanings, professional journalists who are not embedded in any of the established camps or anti-establishment outposts try our best to remain skeptical of them all. But there's no way to tell a story without unintentionally assuming facts or using turns of phrase that some readers will see as a dead giveaway of one terrible bias or another. So, in the interest of greater transparency, let me confess my own strongly-held prejudices as they relate to closed embassies and Big Brother surveillance.

Influenced as a novice by the journalism of I.F. Stone, I continue to believe that all governments lie as part of their job description. The most calculated lying comes from their intelligence services, whose daily work includes shaping public perceptions. I watched all this at Ramparts, the New Left monthly that helped destroy the CIA's postwar network of front groups, and I then worked closely with former CIA operations officer Phil Agee, actively exposing the Company's officers and operations. My wife Anna and I remained close friends of Phil's, though I publicly disagreed with him about his sympathy for Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Like other journalists in the field, I sometimes followed leads that I got directly or through cut-outs from various branches of U.S., British, French, and Israeli intelligence. But I kept myself honest - and drove the spooks to distraction - by refusing to run anything they told me unless my team and I could confirm it through our own investigations. I also lost the best television job I ever had because British intelligence could not figure out which agency I worked for - the FBI, CIA, KGB, or Mossad. I never worked for any of them, or any other, but the Brits apparently believed I was so skilled in my spy craft that I left absolutely no evidence of the clandestine ties they were certain I had.

This jaded background might help explain why I can't help laughing at how clumsy the Obama administration has been in its latest effort to rehabilitate the National Security Agency. Whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald are still revealing how the NSA spies on us all at home and abroad. But the two deadliest wounds so far have been their documented exposé of how the NSA massively and unconstitutionally spies on American citizens who have nothing at all to do with terrorism or any other alleged crime, and how the Obama administration has hidden all this from effective Congressional oversight.

To counter these charges, Washington somehow chose to dramatize how the NSA protects us from possible terrorist attacks by monitoring the communications - not of innocent Americans - but of suspected al Qaeda terrorists in North Africa and the Middle East. According to an official leak that will never face prosecution, U.S. intelligence intercepted direct communications between Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen, and al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahari, who gave "clear orders" to carry out an attack.

"Al Qaeda is on the rise in this part of the world and the NSA program is proving its worth yet again," the ever-ready?? Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CNN's "State of the Union."

"This a good indication of why they're so important," agreed Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Both senators went on to warn that any reform of the NSA could put the country at risk. As CBS News headlined their story, "Hawks use terror threat to defend NSA surveillance."

Critics in Congress immediately saw the sham. What did an overseas intercept have to do with the bulk surveillance that the NSA is conducting within the United States? But most senators and representatives remained wary. Crying wolf and 9/11 fear mongering do work in the short run. The clearest exception was the principled Tea Party Republican Justin Amash, who in late July had joined with Liberal Democrat John Conyers to introduce an amendment that would have severely limited NSA surveillance authority.

The recent terror threats proved the need to safeguard - not infringe upon - Americans' privacy rights, Amash told Fox News. "It's precisely because we live in this dangerous world that we need protections like the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution," he said. "The framers of the Constitution put it in place precisely because they were worried you'd have national security justifications for violating people's rights."

From the beginning of this debate in June, I have argued that we should reject as horse feathers any effort to balance freedom and security. The reason is obvious: "Once we empower government to balance our freedoms against the threat it poses to them, the national security bureaucrats and their helpers in the police and intelligence services will have won. Game over! We lose yet again and our freedoms become even more marginal to any meaningful exercise of democratic power."

Amash takes a different tack, but credits the framers of the Constitution with similar reasoning in writing the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."

Activists on the Left proudly recited the free speech and free press provisions of the First Amendment even before the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union. Not to sound too revolutionary, I think the time has now come for us to join Amash and others in the Tea Party in proclaiming the virtues of the Fourth Amendment. It is our Bill of Rights, too, and as the NSA knows, guaranteed protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is Constitutional Kryptonite that could destroy Big Brother's surveillance state.

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