The Bush Moral Compass
The recent disclosure that President Bush and the NSA have been monitoring phone and other communications between people who are here in the US and, ostensibly, people who are elsewhere triggered a memory for me. The disclosures have evoked a furor because they appear to violate laws about domestic spying which were passed by Congress years ago. The heart of the violation is that the monitoring was done without getting approval from the FISA Board to do so. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was passed in 1978 to review such requests because of Congress' determination that there needed to be a check on unbridled domestic spying. The motive was spying in the 1970s by the NSA.
The uproar has been enough that one of the members of the FISA panel resigned in protest.
The President and Vice President and other Administration supporters have made the case that these conversations were tied to terrorism, are an effective way to monitor terrorists, and that therefore they can go forward and monitor them. They have also implied that because one end of the conversations was reportedly not domestic, that the FISA laws don't apply.
The memory that this triggered in my mind was the incessant repetition, just after the invasion of Iraq, of the idea that invading Iraq and toppling Sadaam was okay because it was an effective way to solve the problem. The idea that actions are justified if they work, regardless of whether they are ethical or legal, seems to be a consistent thread in the major philosophical tenets of the administration. I find it interesting that a president who counts conservative Christians as the core of his base uses a moral compass that Jesus would have rejected out of hand. If anyone in history opposed the idea that doing something because it worked was okay, it was Jesus.
But then I get the feeling that the appeal to Christianity in this administration is rooted in the same realm: they do it because it works. Right and wrong aren't
the issue.
The uproar has been enough that one of the members of the FISA panel resigned in protest.
The President and Vice President and other Administration supporters have made the case that these conversations were tied to terrorism, are an effective way to monitor terrorists, and that therefore they can go forward and monitor them. They have also implied that because one end of the conversations was reportedly not domestic, that the FISA laws don't apply.
The memory that this triggered in my mind was the incessant repetition, just after the invasion of Iraq, of the idea that invading Iraq and toppling Sadaam was okay because it was an effective way to solve the problem. The idea that actions are justified if they work, regardless of whether they are ethical or legal, seems to be a consistent thread in the major philosophical tenets of the administration. I find it interesting that a president who counts conservative Christians as the core of his base uses a moral compass that Jesus would have rejected out of hand. If anyone in history opposed the idea that doing something because it worked was okay, it was Jesus.
But then I get the feeling that the appeal to Christianity in this administration is rooted in the same realm: they do it because it works. Right and wrong aren't
the issue.
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