It’s The Abuse Of Power, Stupid.

by tristero

As expected, the Bush administration tried to shoot the messenger. The purest expression of the administration’s position comes from Terri Wagner, a regular New York Times reader from Elberta, Alabama* who writes:

Your decision to print this article is disturbing to me. Timing is the issue with me.

We have troops in the field fighting every day. We have just recently seen the brutality of the enemy.

The time to consider which programs are successful or not is after the troops come home, which in this case means a free Afghanistan and Iraq.

Please consider the timing of your articles in matters of national security when troops are still on the ground. [Emphasis in original.]

As long as troops are abroad, Bush should not be criticized. Ever. And you wonder why Bush has said troops will be in Iraq during the rest of his term in office.

No one’s criticizing the effort to track terrorist finances, duh.** The real issue is simple:

The Times (and others) would never have decided to break the story were it not the fact that the Bush administration is once again abusing its power and refusing to recognize any rules or limits on that power.

*Of course, Terri’s a regular reader of the Times, even if she lives in Elberta, Alabama which is, I admit, pretty far from New York City. How else could she have learned about the article? She may even have a subscription. You’re not suggesting her letter was part of an organized rightwing campaign against the Times, are you? Honestly, the cynicism of some people.

** From the first time I heard the term a few days after 9/11, I’ve repeatedly said (and of course, this is far from an original thought) the US should infiltrate and thoroughly corrupt the hawwalas, making them unreliable. That, of course, is rather difficult to do when you don’t have more than five fluent Arabic speakers tops working in the FBI (which is true, by the way, at least until very recently). Far easier – and far less effective, if your real goal is to catch terrorists and not hoover up as much info as you possibly can – is to once again operate with no serious oversight and troll through ” ‘at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches’ of people and institutions suspected of having ties to terrorists.”