Time to Ask Tough Questions

opinion and cartoon by Andrew Wahl

You know, I try not to be a wingnut. Before the Bush administration came to power, I considered myself center-left. I wasn't a radical. But the paradigm shifted in 2000. Since Bush "won" the election, I've found that the political landscape keeps tacking to the right, shifting me further and further to the left. My politics haven't changed, but the political reality in which we live surely has.

The result: I don't trust our president. Worse than that, I FEAR our president. Like I said, I try not to be a wingnut. I don't easily buy into the notion that the Bush administration is secretly (or not so secretly) engaged in a monarchical power grab. But the evidence continues to mount.

In addition to the well-documented episodes--the Iraq intelligence lies, secret prisons, illegal wiretaps, etc.--another potential scandal has been brewing just below the mainstream media's radar, most recently documented in the National Journal (http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm).

In 2002, the Defense Department was working on a controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, or TIA for short. The program would sweep public and private databases, emails and the Internet to gather information in hopes of discovering and preventing a terrorist attack. (There's also the little detail that the program's chief proponent is Adm. John Poindexter of Iran-Contra Scandal fame.)

Andrew Wahl

In early 2003, Congress voted to shut down TIA, mainly due to privacy concerns. Reports since suggest that the Bush administration simply ignored Congress by moving the program from Defense to the National Security Agency and changing the name of the program to things like "Basketball," "Topsail" and "ADVISE."

One more time, in case you missed it: the Bush administration ignored an order of congress and covertly kept a program running that can be used to harvest informtion not just about terrorists, but about average Americans, the administration's political enemies, and so on!

Did I miss something here? Isn't this really bad? I don't mean got-a-little-action-in-the-White-House-and-lied-about-it-under-oath bad, but really, really bad. As in high-crimes-and-misdemeanors bad. Why isn't the mainstream media screaming? What does Bush have to do before we can say "the president should be impeached" without sounding crazy?

Wingnut or not, it's time to have that discussion.

No one wants to be painted as soft on terrorism, or branded as an "outside-the-mainstream" radical. But if we don't start questioning the erosion of our civil liberties now, then when? When the king outlaws questioning?

The balance between security and liberty is always a tenuous one. But an editorial cartoonist who came long before me already grappled with this question and delivered an adamant answer: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety," said Benjamin Franklin, "deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Let me know what you think.

Till next issue, Andrew Wahl, toon@offthewahl.com.