Molding the Message
The administration’s latest defense of warrantless wiretapping isn’t really about President Bush or the broader public. It’s about boxing in congressional critics. Plus, the art of Karl Rove.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek
Updated: 6:31 p.m. ET Jan. 25, 2006

Jan. 25, 2006 - It was billed as a “media blitz”—at least by the media itself. But the Bush administration’s focus on the domestic eavesdropping program doesn’t really work as a PR exercise. Nor is it intended to. At the risk of disappointing journalists and bloggers (both of whom suffer from an unhealthy obsession with the media), this isn’t a campaign that is directed at newspapers or TV.

The giveaway is President Bush himself. If this were a media blitz, the president might have delivered a targeted speech. Instead his first foray into the NSA affair this week consisted almost entirely of his everyday stump speech, followed by a set of random questions from his audience about everything from the pressures of his job to the movie “Brokeback Mountain.” On the subject of the day, Bush’s argument amounted to this: a rebranding of the program as “terrorist surveillance,” a brief legal discussion about his war powers and a one-line putdown about whether he broke the law. “If I wanted to break the law,” he quipped, “why was I briefing Congress?”

As a legal defense, that’s surprisingly weak. It’s as if Bill Clinton had said “If I wanted to have an affair, why would I lie about it to a grand jury?” It doesn’t really matter whether the White House briefed some members of Congress or not. It also doesn’t matter whether Bush believed it was legal or not. That kind of argument takes him perilously close to Al Gore’s “no controlling legal authority” line about fund-raising in 1996.

But then, this week isn’t really about President Bush or the broader public. It’s about Congress. “I’m just astonished by the polling,” said one senior Bush aide. “It makes it sound like [the administration is listening to] Aunt Sally’s conversations with Beatrice. This is enemy surveillance when communication flows to a known Al Qaeda suspect or affiliate. We’re going to shape this debate right up to and through the hearings in February.”

That explains why the meat was delivered by Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence at the White House, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The shaping of this debate is a technical process as much as a political one.

Hayden, as the man running the NSA at the time of the September 11 attacks, essentially gave a preview of his congressional testimony. He went out of his way to say how he’d briefed Congress before 9/11 about the legal restrictions on monitoring terrorists in the United States—and how he’d prompted “some looks of disbelief.” He explained that he briefed members again in October 2001, after the terrorist attacks. His message to Congress: don’t pretend you didn’t know.

Most important of all, he went further than anyone in explaining why the administration chose to bypass the courts in eavesdropping. Despite his repeated insistence that he’s no lawyer, Hayden confirmed that the courts—and the attorney general—held the NSA to a higher standard of proof than the president. Instead of showing “probable cause” for eavesdropping, the NSA has to show that it’s being “reasonable” about its wiretapping targets.

That message was reinforced by Gonzales on Tuesday, in an extended discussion of the legal basis for the NSA program. He too focused on Congress, saying that lawmakers gave the president all “necessary and appropriate” powers in their post-9/11 resolution—an argument supported by the Supreme Court in a 2004 ruling. His message to Congress: don’t pretend you didn’t vote for this.

As a way of boxing in their congressional critics, the administration’s use of Hayden and Gonzales was effective—even when their stories weren’t entirely similar. Gonzales, for instance, spoke about the delays and paperwork in seeking a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Hayden, in contrast, put it like this: “If FISA worked just as well, why wouldn’t I use FISA? To save typing? No.”

Bush traveled to the NSA itself to repeat the best of Hayden and Gonzales. “I have the authority, both from the Constitution and the Congress, to undertake this vital program,” he told reporters. “The American people expect me to protect their lives and their civil liberties, and that's exactly what we're doing with this program.”

In setting the stage for congressional hearings, the White House has already shown it is more than capable of debating the legal basis—and the national-security need—for the eavesdropping program. The one area where it still seems vulnerable is the argument over why it didn’t try to update the FISA law after 9/11, along with the range of provisions in the Patriot Act. For now, the White House insists that a public debate would have alerted terrorists to the program. In the context of all the security measures of the Patriot Act, that’s a hard case to make. Wasn’t everyone talking about enhanced security in the weeks after 9/11?

Still, that leaves an increasingly small piece of territory for members of Congress to explore in their hearings next month. Instead of broadening the political attack on the Bush administration, the NSA hearings might well narrow the debate to the kind of technicalities that bores the public to sleep.

Portrait of the Artist
Clocking in at nearly two hours long, Bush’s appearance at Kansas State University was one of the longest presidential events in recent memory—and one where you didn’t want to be caught without a seat. So perhaps it was desperation that drove presidential adviser Karl Rove to quickly grab one of the last remaining chairs in the house: an empty seat at a table reserved for reporters traveling with Bush that day.

Back in the limelight after months of scrutiny in the CIA leak investigation, Rove joked and chatted up a few members of the White House press pool in the minutes before the president took the stage. Once Bush began his remarks, the deputy White House chief of staff occasionally took notes on a small pad of paper he kept inside his jacket pocket. Of greater interest to some reporters, however, was Rove’s frequent doodling on a larger sheet of paper. As Bush took questions from the audience, the man known as “The Architect” ironically drew a small house and, among other things, an object that either appeared to be an incredibly leafy tree or a nuclear cloud.

Rove dashed off, drawings in hand, before reporters could ask him about his artistic instinct, but this could be a lucrative side career for the political guru, or at least an option for how to pay off those sizable legal bills in the wake of the Valerie Plame CIA-leak investigation. After all, there is already a market for Rovian art. On eBay, an oil painting of Rove—titled “Boy Genius”—is currently priced at $20. A folk art painting of Rove—“Cool Karl, Real Cool”— by a Michigan-based artist who specializes in portraits of family pets is currently going for $9.99.

To the untrained eye, Rove’s talents far exceed those of former Rep. Jim Traficant, who has recently taken up painting as he serves out an eight-year prison sentence on federal bribery charges. Traficant’s paintings of horses with flowing hair—described by one Ohio art critic in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer as exhibiting “no overwhelming talent or expertise”—have sold for over $1,800 on eBay. The market for Karl Rove’s art could be considerably more, given the celebrity of Bush’s top adviser among the GOP faithful. Rove already has been a top draw on the campaign trail, where the Republican National Committee charged donors $4,000 apiece in 2004 to attend briefings with the White House aide—with an extra $1,000 charge if you wanted to take a photo with the strategist.

Memory Lapse
Maybe President Bush got carried away with himself. Or maybe he embellished the story for the sake of his British questioner. But when asked about his relationship with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday, Bush sounded more like a Hollywood scriptwriter than, well, a president.

Bush recalled a conversation with Blair in the days before the invasion of Iraq, when it was clear that the two leaders would not get a second United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force. “I said, you don’t want your government to fall, and if you’re worried about it, just go ahead and pull out of the Coalition, so you can save your government,” Bush told the audience at Kansas State University. Blair’s response, according to Bush, was this: “I have made my commitment on behalf of the great country of Britain, and I’m not changing my mind … I’m not interested in politics; what I’m interested in is doing the right thing.”

Bush acknowledged that this anecdote had already appeared “in a book a guy wrote in Washington.” That guy would be Bob Woodward, and the book is called "Plan of Attack." On page 338, Woodward recalls Blair’s reply as being somewhat different: “I said I’m with you. I mean it.” When pressed again, Blair responds: “It’s good of you to say that. But I’m there to the very end.”

It’s not “Brokeback Mountain,” but Bush’s version sounds a little more dramatic than Woodward’s. Then again, it might just be a case of Texan talk sounding better than a British stiff upper lip.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11028508/site/news...f=snwnewsletter

And Hayden doesn't even know what the 4th Amendment wording is - I didn't see any media pick-up on this except on C-Span, suggest everyone watch the video available there.

Maybe the WH should schedule remedial classes on the Constitution.

(In doing a bit of websearch, it does mention that Oberman broadcast a comment on it.)

Here is a snip and link:

It's only the 4th Amendment
Posted 9:10 am | Printer Friendly
Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, delivered remarks in DC yesterday in defense of Bush's warrantless-search program, as part of a week-long political offensive to rally support for the White House initiative. To follow up on yesterday's item about Hayden's description of the scope of the program, it's also worth noting that Gen. Hayden seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the 4th Amendment.

The former national director of the National Security Agency, in an appearance today before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today, appeared to be unfamiliar with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when pressed by a reporter with Knight Ridder's Washington office — despite his claims that he was actually something of an expert on it. […]

As the last journalist to get in a question, Jonathan Landay, a well-regarded investigative reporter for Knight Ridder, noted that Gen. Hayden repeatedly referred to the Fourth Amendment's search standard of "reasonableness" without mentioning that it also demands "probable cause." Hayden seem to deny that the amendment included any such thing, or was simply ignoring it.

The transcript would be hilarious if it weren't so disturbing. Landay noted the 4th Amendment has a provision establishing a "probable cause" standard for searches. Hayden seemed to deny the standard existed. (In case there was any doubt, Hayden is wrong.)

As if that weren't embarrassing enough, Hayden added:

"Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me — and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one — what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is 'reasonable.'"

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/6418.html

Can you imagine the uproar if this had been a democrat?
Where do they buy their teflon?

lenal

WalMart???????