1115.org

This administration is rapidly going down in history as the most secretive ever. They have drawn a vast invisibility cloak over more stuff than any preceding administration, handily beating even the infamous Nixon administration. That may well be because they have engaged in more thoroughly questionable activities than any previous administration. There’s simply a lot more stuff to hide from public view.

The things they have done and found it necessary to hide from public view are troubling enough. But even more troubling are some of the methods they have utilized to do the hiding, as well as to punish those who would presume to unhide what they want to stay hidden. This would include the spying on journalists program, as well as the Presidential order Bush signed on May 5. (See also today’s companion piece, The Annotated General Gonzales.)

Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law. But an presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))

(In case anyone’s wondering, if Negroponte issued the necessary authorization under this order, it would be perfectly legal for Bellsouth and Verizon to say: “We never gave calling data to those folks, NSA.”)

What a pretty pass things have come to. First, the administration co-opts corporations to subvert constitutional liberties in the name of (click your heels, now) National Security and the war on terror. Then, the Decider-in-chief (that would be DIC, though it’s not clear how this acronym is to be pronounced) decides that these corporations should be legally allowed to lie to about these programs and their role in them. This certainly gives a brand new meaning to the term legal fiction.

I am not sure how to bring myself to believe that the Bush regime would authorize its co-conspirators in writing to lie about the conspiracy, while itself intending to tell us the truth. There’s not much point, after all, in getting Bellsouth and Verizon to lie about what they did, if the government itself then goes about blabbing the truth, especially to some of those busybodies in Congress who are worse even than the ACLU.

And what to make of the press conference President Bush conducted right after USA Today broke the story about the NSA’s domestic calling database? According to Time, that should read: the press conference Bush himself insisted on conducting.

“I want to say something about this myself,” he told aides who had gathered in the Oval Office to figure out how to handle the sensation the story was causing across Washington.

And what he was so keen to tell us right away was that he no longer considers himself accountable to the American people in any way, shape or form? Not one word about the program itself, mind you. Makes you wonder what he meant when he went “I want to say something about this“.

He used to be the War President. Now he’s the Terrorism Czar, literally and chillingly. And the pronouncement he made from on high was simply: “I can and will do whatever I want in prosecuting the war on terror. And everything I do is legal. Because I say so, and because I have the in-house legal opinions to back me up. And because no one will ever be allowed to challenge any of it in any court anyway.”

Fortunately, that argument has an Achilles heel, even if Bush in his delusionary hubris doesn’t see it—the word “ever”. Maybe not on your watch. Mr. President. Maybe you will indeed be able to stonewall every legal challenge, using the “state secrets privilege” as a last resort when everything else fails. But that works only as long as you and yours are running both Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic. And that isn’t going to be forever, is it, President Malfoy? Not by a long shot.

And that’s about all that the sixty plus per cent of us who disapprove of Bush and his Bushisms can do for now—wait for that future to arrive. Keep railing against the sins of this presidency and wait. But as I wait, I also worry. Worry not that that future day of reckoning may not arrive, but worry about what may yet come out between now and then.

Some of the activities the Bush administration has cheerfully engaged in are truly extraordinary for a government that furiously insists it occupies the moral high ground in the various wars it is engaged in—kidnapping (and conspiracy to kidnap), smuggling kidnapped persons across international borders (and conspiracy to smuggle), secret detention (in violation of every international norm), torture (in violation of every international norm), single-handedly shredding the Geneva convention into such little bits that it’s probably rendered ineffective for all time, secretly restoring former gulags to their former glory, surreptitiously unleashing the NSA to systematically subvert the Fourth Amendment.

But what worries me more than all of this stuff are the unknown unknowns—the things we don’t even know we don’t know, because no one has yet engineered the leaks which constitute our only window into the murky goings on behind the invisibility cloak.