Our Long National Nightmare Continues

Roughly speaking, there have been four great showdowns over abuse of executive power in modern U.S. history. The earliest has to do with domestic surveillance by the CIA, and other ill-conceived schemes, as revealed by the 1975 Church Committee hearings. The second, closely overlapping the first, involved all the excesses of the Nixon administration, including Watergate itself, the "Plumbers," the secret bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger"s wiretapping of staffers, etc. The third, the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan Administration, seems quaint compared to the fourth, the Bush administration"s NSA domestic surveillance program, and the broader assertion of executive authority to torture and otherwise ignore international law.

These  episodes have certain themes in common. Yes, one of them is that they were all hatched in the first term of Republican presidencies and revealed only after reelection, but that’s not the answer I’m looking for. (Also, many of the CIA abuses preceded Nixon, which is why I separate them from Watergate.)

First, all of them produced a backlash. The Church Committee revelations, which Garance Franke-Ruta and Ruth Marcus both recently disinterred, are remembered now mostly by CIA veterans as the beginning of a period in which, in their view, our intelligence capabilities were crippled. The War Powers Resolution and  the Budget Act of 1974, both of which Vice President Cheney criticized in a recent interview in which he described his view of executive power, were all residue of the backlash against Nixon. The lesson seems clear: In a constititutional system, those who want executive power to be protected and respected, should be especially wary of presidents who take it too far.

Second, all of them involved creating a zone of extreme secrecy in which decisions, and even the processes leading to those decisions, were kept secret not just from Congress and the Courts, but within the executive branch itself. The defense of the warantless eavesdropping that seems to be emerging on the right is that it was not the FISA court they were trying to evade, since that was no obstacle, but the process within the executive branch of generating a request and getting it to the FISA court. Dana Priest’s recent story in the Post reports that even the legal reasoning behind the NSA program was kept secret from the executive branch lawyers who are supposed to handle these things and are capable of handling classified information. Nixon’s operations similarly operated in secret from the FBI and CIA. In Iran-Contra, Oliver North said the Reagan administration sought to create, "an off the shelf, self financing, independent covert operations capability."

Third, in these zones of extreme secrecy, in which nothing ever has to be justified to anyone outside of the closed circle, all sorts of insanity flourishes. Personal obsessions take hold and are pursued unchecked. Ideas that would be too embarassing to explain to anyone seem to make sense and are carried out. This was true in every example, from the nutball Castro assassination schemes hatched in the CIA to the idea of firebombing the Brookings Institution in the Nixon White House, to the bizarre excesses of Iran-Contra, such as delivering a cake shaped like a key and a Bible signed by Reagan to the Iranian clerics. All of Iran-Contra is really an example of this process, as the White House’s obsession with evading congressional restrictions on aid to the Nicaraguan contras led them into a far more consequential entanglement in Middle Eastern politics that never would have made sense on its own. 

Given what we know about these previous episodes in which the executive branch created zones of extreme secrecy, I think it’s quite likely that we will soon learn that the NSA domestic surveillance program involved much more than just tracking people who received calls from known al Qaeda suspects, something that I certainly wouldn’t object to. I don’t know what it will be -- some have speculated that it involved monitoring journalists -- but whatever it is, it was something that couldn’t be justified even within the administration.