Retreat and Cheat (NYT editorial board)

[struggle4progress]

Published: January 21, 2007

President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was once deemed so vital to national security that it could not be subjected to judicial review. Last week, the White House said it was doing just that.

In 2005, the White House would not even comment on news reports about the C.I.A.’s prisons because Americans’ safety depended on their being kept secret. In 2006, Mr. Bush held a photo-op to announce that he was keeping them open.

The administration has repeatedly insisted that it was essential to the American way of life for Mr. Bush to be able to imprison foreigners without trial or legal counsel. Now the administration claims it was trying to bring those detainees to trial all along but was stymied by white-shoe lawyers ...

Mr. Bush’s aides don’t try very hard to hide it. The day the shift on domestic wiretapping was announced, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech in which he sneered at the idea of allowing judges to review national security policies. The next day, he was in the Senate refusing to turn over the agreement that he said would provide judicial review for the wiretapping. And his lawyers were in court arguing that a lawsuit over the warrantless eavesdropping should be dropped because Mr. Bush said he would stop the operation ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/opinion/21sun1.html

[necso]

1. More of the cheat, methinks,

than retreat. You can't retreat (in reality) from a position you only pretended to hold, or retreat (in reality) to a place you're only pretending to go. You can only pretend to do so; although this is often enough to (repeatedly) fool many.

But such pretenses are only illusions made up of hollow words and empty motions: the casting of shadows without either substance or light. And one must learn to disregard such things -- and to seek for, and to give weight to, only what has substance; only what proves itself (substantially, etc) in reality.