First, salutes and bravos to Sen. Dodd for showing yesterday what political courage looks like. And how it produces results, halting, at least temporarily, retroactive immunity for the telecoms’ spying.
And let’s support Sen. Wyden’s great idea to make available to the entire Senate, before resuming this issue, the legal reasoning which Bush Adminstration supplied to the telecoms to assure them everything was constitutionally hunky-dory. Reasoning that Wyden (who’s seen it) describes as stupefyingly flimsy and inadequate.
Those words apply alas to Sen. Milkuski’s plea not to abandon immunity. Let us remember, declared Milkuski, the Context: those harrowing days after 9/11.
“These companies were asked to assist with a communications program to prevent further attacks…. I know my colleagues would say the lawyers knew that and it was law school and so on. But what would you have done if you headed up a company in the law department? Would you have fretted over the law or would you look at how maybe you could cooperate, how maybe when you see the Beamer family on TV and they said they were ready to roll and we all felt as though we were ready to roll, maybe if you were a telecom company, you were ready to roll too? Maybe you were rolling the dice. But you did have a letter that assured you what was legal and necessary from the Attorney General, the White House, and that also had been authorized by the President.”
Funny, Qwest was a telecom that asked to see a proper court order or warrant, as required by law. Then it would have been very “ready to roll.” But it never received a proper legal order. So it didn’t.
A real “roll” model.
Senators swear to uphold the Consitution. The planes destroyed the twin towers—not the Constitution. The rule of law didn’t become moot because of Bush belatedly posing on the rubble in a windbreaker with his arm around an out-of-town firefighter.
Recently I got to thinking how far all this has gone, Bush & Co.’s defrauding of America’s vulnerabilities for their own catastrophic purposes. I went back to the short essay Susan Sontag wrote in The New Yorker days after the attack. It got her vilified ferociously in certain quarters (what would Andrew Sullivan say still, despite his finding of the light). Some of her words are tough and harsh, they make you flinch, coming when the smoke had barely settled.
But you know what: Susan Sontag was right. And right on. Almost innocent, in a way, seeing where we’ve come to since.
Worth reviewing, I think.
From The New Yorker, September 24, 2001
"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be."
—Susan Sontag
