Rebanging the Drum of Fear

The current NSA surveillance argument is seeing the Bush administration trying almost anything to rekindle Al Qaeda fears within the American public and public officials. Last night, a sudden "nerve agent scare" in the Senate building saw an evacuation, which later proved to be a "false" alarm. With subsequent tests, the nerve agent had mysteriously disappeared from the scene. This did not, however, stop CNN from blasting coverage of the non-event for hours last night. Lurid descriptions of nerve agent effects glowed brightly from screens. I'm sure Fox hyped up the fright even more.

Today, Bush announced that US allies stopped a shoe-bomber from blowing up the "Liberty Tower" in LA. Though there is no Liberty Tower in LA, it was clarified that Bush meant to say "Library" but that the word liberty popped out, mostly I expect because, while Bush is very used to saying the word 'liberty," he isn't used to saying "library" much at all.

Though the plot had been known for sometime, it is now being re-employed to drum up the fear that Al Qaeda plots are rampant. Though the plot's deraillment had nothing to do with the NSA surveillance program, its reiteration by Bush is designed for one purpose: to justify the NSA program as a necessary part in the larger effort to thwart terrorist attacks.

The larger media and the discussions surrounding the program have amazingly failed to note that the NSA program has produced almost nothing of value itself.

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat....

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls.

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable.

None of this matters to Bush or Gonzales or anyone else standing by the program. The effort is now clearly underway to raise the fear factor in the public consciousness in order to distract from the inefficacy and illegality of the warrentless surveillance itself.