Years ago, there was a State Senator in California — I forget his name — who was accused of a gross impropriety and conflict of interest because he'd voted for some bill that enriched a certain corporation while he was a major stockholder in that corporation. He promptly called a press conference and issued a denial in the clearest and most outraged terms. He did not own stock in that company, he said…and it turned out that was technically true. Some time later, reporters discovered that the stock was registered to his five-year-old daughter. I suspect that some or all of the statements the Bush Administration is making about the NSA situation are "true" in that sense.
A number of commentators seem to also think that and they're likening the hair-splitting to when Bill Clinton said, "That depends on the meaning of the word, 'is.'" I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Clinton may have been trying to weasel on the truth there but at least he was doing it under oath in a deposition where his interrogators could ask him the question again and again, rephrasing it to narrow in on specifics. If you've ever been deposed, you know that's what they do. Unlike a statement to the press, you don't get to give your evasive answer just once with your calculated phrasing because they get to pose follow-ups and you have to respond to them.
That's what I think is missing here. When George W. Bush says, "…we do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," I think I'd like a sharp reporter to be able to ask a couple of follow-ups like, "Who is 'we' in that sentence? Does anyone in the government listen to domestic phone calls without court approval?" And given some of the ways in which our Attorney General has attempted to define the powers of the presidency as virtually unlimited, I'd like someone to ask, "Do you believe a president has the right to authorize eavesdropping on domestic phone calls without court approval?"
My objection to the NSA program may have less to do with what they're doing than it does with the fact that they assert their power to do it without oversight. I don't trust anyone in government to wield power without oversight and I certainly don't trust the band of guys who are now going around claiming, "Well, we never actually said there was a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda…we never actually said we were sure there were Weapons of Mass Destruction…"
People keep e-mailing me to say, "If you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing, you should have no problem with having your calls monitored." I think a fair response to that is: "If the Bush administration isn't doing anything they shouldn't be doing, they should have no problem with letting an independent entity such as the FISA court monitor what they're doing."