[IP] Safire on wiretapping
Begin forwarded message:
From: leigh blankenship <leigh_b@xxxxxxx>
Date: January 2, 2006 4:03:25 AM EST
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Safire on wiretapping
For IP...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10558586/
MR. SAFIRE: OK. I have a thing about wiretapping.
MS. GOODWIN: A personal thing.
MR. SAFIRE: I was writing a speech on welfare reform, and the
president looks at it and says, "OK, I'll go with it, but this is
not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can
beforehand. Maybe we'll get something in the paper." And so I go
back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to
know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, "Hey, you want
a leak? I'll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about
welfare reform." And he took it down and wrote a little story about
it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so
they hear a White House speechwriter say, "Hey, you want a leak?"
And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone
call I got was tapped. I didn't like that. And when it finally
broke--it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I
was on the right side--but it told me how easy it was to just take
somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good
reason and listen to every conversation in his home--you know, my
wife talking to her doctor, my--everything.
So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what's
happening now is that the--as a result of that scandal back in the
'70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or
requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's
a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000
yeses.
MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA.
MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a
little paperwork beforehand slows them down and makes them think
for a minute. It doesn't slow them down as much as the president
has made out to believe, because there's a wrinkle in it saying
that if it's a real emergency and you have to get this information,
then you can get it and get the approval within 72 hours
afterwards. So there's always this struggle in a war between
liberty and security. Doris, you go into that in your book, and
Lincoln did, indeed, suspend habeas corpus, but there it is in the
Constitution, "It shall not be suspended except in invasion or a
rebellion," so he had the right to. He didn't have the right, I
think, to close the Brooklyn Eagle or see the arrest of the leading
dissident, Vanlandingham, and he made some mistakes.
But just as FDR later made a mistake with the eight saboteurs and
hanged them all, and just as we made a terrible mistake with the
Japanese-Americans in World War II and have apologized for that.
During wartime, we have this excess of security and afterwards we
apologize. And that's why I offended a lot of my conservative and
hard-line friends right after September 11th when they started
putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president
can't seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends looked at me
like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive
security, and I'm with the critics on that.
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