The Game Plan

A strategy is emerging in the White House to next week's Senate Judiciary hearings on the NSA illegal spying program. They're going to shut up, shut up, and when that's done do some more shutting up. Yesterday's session in the Intelligence Committee offered a sneak preview:

Senate Democrats on Thursday angrily accused the Bush administration of mounting a public relations campaign to defend the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program while withholding details of the secret eavesdropping from Congressional oversight committees.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, compared the administration's public disclosures of limited information about the N.S.A. program in the six weeks since it was first disclosed to what he described as a similarly misleading use of intelligence before the war in Iraq.

"I am deeply troubled by what I see as the administration's continued effort to selectively release intelligence information that supports its policy or political agenda while withholding equally pertinent information that does not do that," Mr. Rockefeller said.

Another Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said the administration had engaged in "consistent stonewalling" to prevent the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees from carrying out their oversight duties. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, suggested the administration's public accounts of the eavesdropping program were contradictory, noting that President Bush had described the agency's interception, without court warrants, of "a few" messages, while Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, had referred to "thousands" of messages.

In a pointed exchange, Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked Mr. Negroponte whether there were any other "intelligence collection" programs that had not been revealed to the full Intelligence Committees.

Mr. Negroponte replied, "Senator, I don't know if I can comment on that in open session."

They're going to try and run out the clock on this while continuing to marshal public support through dishonest statements (like the whole "If Al Qaeda is calling, we want to know about it" business, when that's not the issue). Though members of the Cabinet, and the President himself, have offered some details about the spying program in the past, now they're going to stop talking.

Think Progress has more examples of stonewalling in yesterday's session:

WYDEN: Mr. Director, is it correct that when John Poindexter’s program, Operation Total Information Awareness, was closed, that several of Mr. Poindexter’s projects were moved to various intelligence agencies?

NEGROPONTE: I don’t know the answer to that question.

WYDEN: Do any of the other panel members know? The press has reported intelligence officials saying that those programs run by Mr. Poindexter — I and others on this panel led the effort to close it. We want to know if Mr. Poindexter’s programs are going on somewhere else. Can anyone answer that? Mr. Mueller?

MUELLER: I have no knowledge of that, sir.

WYDEN: Any other panel members?

HAYDEN: Senator, I’d like to answer in closed session.

They simply refuse to give Congress the ability to conduct their job, which includes vigorous oversight of the executive branch. If this is the same way in Judiciary, and the Democrats get their act together there (with Arlen Specter, a chairman more favorable to wanting oversight than Bushite lapdog Pat Roberts, who heads Intelligence), I think we could see contempt of Congress citations here. This is absolutely ridiculous, and the Democrats have to mount as aggressive a campaign as they've ever done to get to the bottom of it.

"A-Hole of the Week" honors go to the aforementioned Pat Roberts, who can't even come up with an original line (John Cornyn said this idiotic remark a month ago):

At the close of the hearing, committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) angered Democrats by suggesting they were more focused on threats to civil liberties by intelligence agencies than threats from terrorist networks.

"I would only point out that you really don't have any civil liberties if you're dead," Roberts said.

Give me liberty or give me death. Without freedom there's nothing to defend. A real American would know that.