After two months of waiting, I finally received a letter back from the office of North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole regarding George W. Bush’s program at the National Security Agency to engage in wiretapping of Americans’ phones without warrants. In that letter, she excuses Bush’s behavior with a variety of weasel words.
Dole starts out by using the moniker “terrorist surveillance program,” as if the only people being spied upon are actual terrorists. But the people being spied on are those suspected — without enough evidence to warrant a warrant — of being terrorists, not proven terrorists. What’s more, people who are associated with suspects are spied upon, too, and people who talk to associates of suspects…. Expand this web outward, and pretty these “terrorists” start to look like you and me.
Dole moves on to say that
The U.S. Constitution, however, makes protecting our nation from foreign attack the president’s most solemn duty.
No, no it doesn’t. Go ahead and read the Constitution itself. Article II, Section I — the part of the Constitution most particularly regarding the president — says nothing about defense from foreign attack. Instead, it refers to the President’s Oath of Office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The U.S. Constitution makes protecting our nation’s Constitution the president’s most solemn duty.
This matters for Senator Elizabeth Dole’s last set of weasel words: “the civil liberties of law-abiding citizens have not been diminished.” She very carefully avoids writing that “the civil liberties of citizens have not been diminished,” and the determination of whether an object of surveillance has broken a law is suspended, since there is no involvement of a criminal court — and as much as Dole would like us to forget this, in the United States of America a person is innocent until proven guilty. The Constitution of the United States of America, and its associated liberties, apply to all people within the borders of the United States, not just people who George W. Bush has decided are law-abiding, and not just citizens.
Taken together, these weasel words (or, if they are meant sincerely, betrayals of profound ignorance) indicate that the state of North Carolina has in office a dangerously anti-constitutional Senator. It will be a test of the integrity of North Carolina to see whether its residents remove Dole from office at the next available opportunity.
