Reply #88: Bush Isn't Spying on al Qaeda ... He's Spying on You

[L. Coyote]

Bush Isn't Spying on al Qaeda ... He's Spying on You
By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted August 4, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/58806/

The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the spying operations revealed in Alberto Gonzales' Senate testimony is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury when he parsed words about George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to avoid tough questions.

On July 27, for instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow fended off reporters who asked about apparent contradictions in Gonzales's testimony by saying:

"This gets us back into the situation that I understand is unsatisfactory because there are lots of questions raised and the vast majority of those we're not going to be in a position to answer, simply because they do involve matters of classification that we cannot and will not discuss publicly."

Discussion closed.

But al-Qaeda terrorists always have assumed that their electronic communications were vulnerable to interception .....