Bad example

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post explaining that it was "Legal surveillance, not illegal eavesdropping, stopped the U.K. terrorist attacks" and that Bush defenders should stop lying about what BushCo has been doing and what opponents are saying about it. None of the opponents of the illegal surveillance is saying that the NSA shouldn't spy on suspected bad guys -- we're saying that they should just do it legally. It's ludicrous to claim that, what the British and American authorities appear to have accomplished recently within the law, in any way justifies what BushCo did previously in violation of the law.

Bush supporters have been attempting to exploit the U.K. terrorist plot to bolster support for an array of extremist and lawless Bush policies -- from warrantless eavesdropping to torture -- even though there is not a shred of evidence that any of those policies played any role whatsoever, either in the U.S. or England, in impeding this plot

[...]

Even more significantly, to the extent that U.S. law enforcement agents attempted to assist in the pre-arrest surveillance of these terrorists, they were able to eavesdrop on the conversations of scores of individuals inside the U.S. by obtaining the approval of the FISA court, just as the law requires

[...]

Let us emphasize one last point. In their zeal to imprison Jim Risen and the New York Times editors responsible for disclosure of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, Bush followers continuously claimed that this disclosure somehow alerted terrorists to the fact that we were eavesdropping on their conversations (as though they were not aware of that before) and that, as a result, we have now lost the ability to monitor their conversations. Now that they know we are eavesdropping, so this "reasoning" goes, they will not use telephones to talk to each other any more.

And yet, here was a major plot foiled because the terrorist plotters were using telephones to communicate about their plans -- and using banking systems to wire money -- all of which law enforcement could track within the law. This whole episode potently illustrates just how inane are the claims that the Times' NSA story (and its SWIFT disclosures) would endanger national security. Terrorists already knew full well that we monitor their telephone conversations and banking transactions, and they knew that before the New York Times "told" them so. But in order to plan terrorist attacks, terrorists must communicate with one another and send money to each other. Somehow, the Times' story did not prevent us from eavesdropping on all of these conversations. That's because the Times stories -- as has been evident from the beginning -- told terrorists nothing which they could use to avoid detection.

Only Bush followers could point to a successful law enforcement operation which, by all appearances, complied with the law, and try to use it to argue how necessary it is that the law be broken. That is the central myth at the heart of the Bush desire for increased authoritarian measures -- that there is a forced choice between protection from terrorist threats and the rule of law.