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Heather Wilson
So who is this Republican women congresswoman who had the nerve to stand up the President and tell him that she has "serious concerns" about his domestic eavesdropping program?
Well she's my age (actually six months older than me). She shares my last name. She's a gaduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes Scholar.
And in addition to national security, her pet projects are jobs, public education, health care, and simplifying the tax code.
But she's pro-life, had a tizzy fit over Janet Jackson's nipples being shown at halftime, and took a ton of money from Delay and Abramoff.
I wouldn't vote for her, but I am glad she has the guts to stand up to the President and tell him when he's wrong. He could use more friends like that.
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Posted February 11, 2006 in PoliticsComments
Another denizen of Planet Center? ;)
Posted by: Steve | Feb 11, 2006 2:06:30 PM
Bush wiretaps have affected an estimated 1700 US citizens in transcontinental communications with suspected al Qaeda terrorists.
Clinton's Echelon program intercepted millions of domestic conversations for "economic" reasons. http://cryptome.org/echelon-60min.htm
Where was the outrage then? Where was the NY Times?
You complain about our intelligence over the WMD and yet you want to tie the hands of our intelligence people. You want us to catch Bin Laden, but you take great pleasure in continuing to publicize our techniques.
Stick to VC, something you know a bit about.
Posted by: Thumbster | Feb 11, 2006 3:11:28 PM
Stick to reading right wing blogs Thumbster, something you know about.
Posted by: fred | Feb 11, 2006 5:05:27 PM
Fred - I wonder if this has anything to do with it: http://www.ourcongress.org/race/nm01
Its election time and the democratic contender is a close challenger otherwise I doubt these hypocrites will deviate from the party message.
Posted by: rajesh | Feb 11, 2006 5:10:54 PM
Fred,
I wonder if you are viewing Heather Wilson's "guts" to stand up to the president in its full light. I believe that the below insights from Daniel Henninger from the WSJ Editorial page might be closer to the truth. And yes, I know, I need to stop reading those right-wing blogs (wink).
David.
WONDER LAND
By DANIEL HENNINGER
If Al Qaeda Phones Tell
Them We Can't Take the Call
February 10, 2006; Page A18
Let's start with the one thing we know for sure about the Bush administration's program to listen to al Qaeda's phone calls into and out of the United States: It's dead.
After all the publicity of the past two weeks, does anyone think that the boys working on plans for Boston Harbor, the Golden Gate Bridge or Chicago's Loop are still chatting by phone? If the purpose of the public exposure was to pull the plug on the pre-emptive surveillance program, mission accomplished. Be safe, Times Square.
At the least, al Qaeda's operatives in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Hamburg and the U.S. will hold off phoning in the next mass-murder plan until the U.S. Senate finishes deliberating Arlen Specter's proposal to legislatively order up an opinion from the judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, est. 1978, as to whether the antiterrorist wiretap program violates the law that created their jobs.
This passage appears on the second page of the 9/11 Commission's 567-page report, On Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: "We learned that the institutions charged with protecting our borders, civil aviation and national security did not understand how grave this threat could be, and did not adjust their policies, plans and practices to deter or defeat it. . . . We learned of the pervasive problems of managing and sharing information across a large and unwieldy government [my emphasis] that had been built in a different era to confront different dangers."
And those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Having watched one passenger-filled airliner fly into a skyscraper on a peaceful morning in lower Manhattan more than four years ago, I'd just as soon not repeat the experience. If the question on the table is whether it is legal for the executive branch to listen without warrants to phone calls between people who repeatedly chant "Death to America," then I guess I'm for declaring it respectful of our laws and getting on with it.
But insofar as the surveillance program has been rendered moot, let's by all means pull over to the side of the road and have a long national conversation about it. (But don't send your thoughts to Sen. Specter via the Postal Service, as his Web site contains the following Important Notice: "Security restrictions now cause considerable delay in processing postal mail sent to Senate offices.")
The issues at the center of this dispute are in fact intellectually interesting, having to do with separation of powers, legal rules versus legal discretion, and competing interpretations of the Fourth Amendment and Article II of the Constitution.
But let us here consider something that tends to fall outside legal considerations -- effective management. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said, "You can't take 535 members of Congress and tell them everything and protect the nation's secrets." Mr. Cheney was reflecting the view, which arose at the time of the Founding Fathers, that foreign policy was disorganized under the Articles of Confederation and belonged under a strong executive. A primary reason for calling the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was the mess Congress had made of managing foreign policy.
Then later in the week GOP Rep. Heather Wilson suddenly became famous for presumably dissenting from the White House line and demanding a "complete review" of the surveillance program. Rep. Wilson, who chairs a House intelligence oversight subcommittee, is rightly regarded as one of the House's savvier and more serious members on national security issues. But . . .
Rep. Wilson is in a neck-and-neck re-election fight back in her New Mexico district with state Attorney General Patricia Madrid. Rep. Wilson is under pressure because her district is heavily Democratic; the opposition's primary line of attack has been that Rep. Wilson isn't sufficiently "independent" of the Bush White House. Right after her highly publicized NSA declaration this week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee got out a statement that "Rep. Wilson is now and has always been a rubber stamp for the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration."
What this means is that the local politics of Albuquerque is now setting national security policy. Why them? Why not accord the same overweighted political status to the Third District in North Carolina, which happens to house Camp Lejeune? The primary argument against letting Albuquerque set national security policy through Rep. Wilson's political problems back home is found in that earlier statement from the 9/11 Commission: You simply cannot disperse policy formation in this area across all branches of government in the guise of checks and balances and then expect efficient management in, say, stopping terrorists. Nor can you present the paperwork required to satisfy "probable cause" before a FISA judge prior to every proposed antiterror wiretap and not risk flipping the competition's outcome in favor of the terrorists.
Historically, the proper path for working out these national security disputes hasn't been Sen. Specter's preposterous appeal to let some judge design the nation's antiterror policy but rather through informal political negotiation between the executive branch and Congress. That only works, though, if the presidency has someone who will negotiate in good faith. Who's that? Hillary Clinton, already on the campaign trail in front of the UAW Wednesday, contributed: "You cannot explain to me why we have not captured or killed the tallest man in Afghanistan." Well for starters, he's probably not making phone calls.
At the Judiciary Committee hearings Monday, Sen. Leahy announced: "Mr. Attorney General, in America, our America, nobody is above the law, not even the president of the United States." Got it. But here's the bottom line on the surveillance program. It was going to work, and help lessen the chance of another atrocity in our America, only if it stayed secret. The odds of it staying secret would diminish as its existence spread through the Congress and judicial system. Now it is public, and its utility is about zero. What's left is the legal issue of whether it violated FISA. We can only look forward to the answer.
Posted by: David Weinberg | Feb 11, 2006 5:57:04 PM
Yeah, Thumbster. The New York Times didn't do anything while that piddly little liberal 60 Minutes program did. Or at least that's what you seem to be saying, sinc that's where the transcript is from.
Where were those whiny liberals like Bob Barr, Mike Dewine, Sam Brownback and Arlen Specter (all Republicans, most of them senators) then?
Gimme a break. If you don't like the message, try doing something productive instead of just shooting the messenger.
Posted by: Derek Scruggs | Feb 11, 2006 7:00:46 PM
Bush wiretaps have affected an estimated 1700 US citizens in transcontinental communications with suspected al Qaeda terrorists.
The problem is since they no longer even need to get an ex post facto warrant, we can have no idea if that number is accurate.
I have no problem, given an exigent circumstance, not requiring a warrant prior to a search or a wiretap. But the checks and balances spelled out in the constitution necessitate that the various branches of government be held accountable to one another. If warrantless surveillance or search is required, find something or not, you need to go before a judge and give cause.
Conservatives understand this, knee jerk GOP partisans do not.
Posted by: Erik | Feb 11, 2006 8:21:46 PM
WSJ Covered this in an editorial Fri. WonderLand, Daniel Henninger (sp?). Intelligent right.
http://online.wsj.com/search/date.html#SB113954166203870406
He makes the case that she is angling for re-election, and that local politics are dictating national outcomes.
This is a personal blog, but crossing over into the political realm is a step you cannot take back from your readership... it's like crossing the river Tiber.
Posted by: Andrew Schmitt | Feb 11, 2006 10:49:21 PM
Did any of you catch 24 this week? While attempting to track down a missing shipment of nerve gas cannisters that a group of Russian separatists intend to use on U.S. soil, CTU intercepts a cell phone call placed by their leader. They trace the call to an L.A. Penthouse and send a SWAT Team crashing in, wounding the owner in the process. No court orders, No search warrants, and yet I felt oddly reassured.
Posted by: Michael Pate | Feb 12, 2006 7:18:32 AM
Henninger states: "And those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Having watched one passenger-filled airliner fly into a skyscraper on a peaceful morning in lower Manhattan more than four years ago, I'd just as soon not repeat the experience. If the question on the table is whether it is legal for the executive branch to listen without warrants to phone calls between people who repeatedly chant "Death to America," then I guess I'm for declaring it respectful of our laws and getting on with it."
Might I add one suggestion on how to prevent future attacks? Next time there is an intelligence report that states "Bin Laden determined to attack the US" and goes on to state how (using hijacked airplanes) maybe the great commander in chief should actually the time to, you know, skim through it and take action instead of clearing brush.
Posted by: rajesh | Feb 12, 2006 7:34:08 AM
Thanks to the leaks we first lost the ability to track terrorists via their mobile phones. Now we've lost the capability to intercept their calls to US based support.
Gee - that's a heck of a platform for those political idiots to run on.
Posted by: David | Feb 12, 2006 8:43:55 AM
that's ridiculous. Do you think they'll stop using phones? Of course not. Nor the web. The question is whether or not Bush is spying on me. or you. For whatever reason. Without a warrant, without the oversight provided --quite easily and conveniently--by the constitutional balance of powers.
What I fear more than Bush, Cheney, and their illegal domestic spying on political and economic enemies (not just terrorists), is the attitude people like thumbster have taken and promote: let us do whatever we want with no constraints and no oversight. He sees some crazy nobility in this, while I see a terrifying reflection of Stalin's Russia, Pinnochet's Chile, and present-day China. Don't forget J E Hoover and Nixon's enemies list.
Not to mention Bush lied to take us to war, blew nailing Bin leden, ignored reports prior to 9/11 of Al Quaeda's immediate plans, and stopped funding Russia's dismantling of nuclear warheads in July 2001. We have plenty to be frightened of--both from Bush's blatent, arrogant disregard for the law, and from the complete mismanagement of this country. I wonder why the wingers hate freedom so much, hate our Constitution, hate law, hate justice.
Oh, and btw, I lived in Lower Manhattan on that day, too, lost 11 neighbors and 1 friend. They didn't die because we have (had) civil liberties, or that Bush couldn't spy on us then (can't now but does), or because we had (but apparently no longer have) a constitutional separation of powers.
Posted by: Charlie Crystle | Feb 12, 2006 11:55:03 AM
I'm inclind to believe that Heather is simply maneuvering in a re-election year. Her politics speak for themselves, which is to say that they are appalingly intollerant.
Posted by: Jackson | Feb 12, 2006 12:44:55 PM
The fundamental problem I have with people's concerns about the eavesdropping program is that while they may be legitimate concerns, they are being hyped in a bad faith effort to damage the president politically. Saying that the president is "spying on Americans" is intentionally misleading. 9/11 could have been prevented by this eavesdropping program with very little, if any, damage to privacy rights. I understand the concern regarding court oversight of the program, but we're talking about a administrative quibble, if anything.
Posted by: Rockwell | Feb 12, 2006 8:00:51 PM
Behind the success of 24 is the fact that the American people (hell most people around the world) hope and expect that the government is doing exactly what Jack Bauer does. Just like how rigourous questioning of suspects is applauded is severe cases involving ongoing security problems (kidnapping, hostage taking).
Watch the movie Hostage, and you'll be frustrated with the idea of hostage negotiators and want SWAT teams to take out hostage takers as a matter of course.
The problem for the position in favour of privacy is that the concrete examples are about protecting terrorists, suspected terrorists, and those that enable them. I have seen no good examples of how these programs would harm regular people. Meanwhile CNBC highlights how there appeared to be no prosecutors concerned with businesses that were fraudulently obtaining cell phone records and there was no specific law against the practice, although they were easily violating a wide variety of other laws.
So the general public sees that they have no effective privacy, but the ACLU and others go on to specifically protect the concrete "rights" of jihadi-linked individuals. That's obviously a losing proposition.
On the larger point, Congress should have oversight, but staffers should not be given any access. As very political employees, Congressional staffers can not be trusted with any information vital to national security. They are generally young, drawn from the fringes of their parties, and move in and out of PACs, NGOs, Foundations, and Congressional offices. This is a specific problem for Dem staffers now (since they will tend to have hardcore leftist/anti-war anti-security staffers) but is a good general principle. Security is firstly dependent on cutting down the number of people who have the information. Cutting out large numbers of unreliable people would be a good first step.
Posted by: hey | Feb 12, 2006 8:03:35 PM
The president has damaged himself politically. I have nothing to do with it, and it is in fact in good faith, Rockwell, that I protest his illegal activities. You can continue to blindly support this administration, but your country is getting sacked by these same people, making you complicit.
Posted by: Charlie Crystle | Feb 13, 2006 1:21:54 AM
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