Anyone who spends much time researching issues on the internet knows full well the difficulty in trying to find non-partisan, objective, and rational discussions that would illuminate rather than obfuscate the facts through which one can make a well-thought out decision about where to take a stand.

And I don’t buy the canard that by delving into both sides of an issue, essential truths are revealed that can assist the interlocutor in finding the means to arrive at a rational position on questions of national import. There isn’t just a chasm between left and right on many issues, there is in fact a universe of difference – alternate realities where the inhabitants live by different physical laws and are governed by different passions, differing worldviews, and conflicting priorities that combine to make it impossible to get to the nub of the matter and uncover the essential factuality that should be driving the debate.

This is especially true on matters pertaining to Presidential power and how it has been exercised under the Administration of George Bush. You can learn virtually nothing by reading sites like this one or those on the other side of this issue simply because the personality and ideology of the President are seen through two prisms where the same facts cast entirely different colors of the rainbow. There is no gray contained in this kind of political spectrum analysis, only darker hues on one side and lighter ones on the other. As such, there is no way to assay the contradictory points of view, an effort that would entail the invention of entirely new colors to describe the reduction of both arguments to a form that would be intellectually useful.

I am not a lawyer. Nor am I a Constitutional expert. I am blessed with no special abilities except my own native intelligence and 52 years of life experience living in a free country where thought isn’t regulated and we are only limited in our search for knowledge by time and circumstance. So when I came to the conclusions contained in this article, I realized a brand new personal verity; humility is truth.

The Dutch priest and humanist Erasmus reached the very same conclusion more than 500 years ago. Admitting you don’t know everything can be a liberating experience as it was for Erasmus who saw the search for knowledge as an excruciating but exciting endeavor. The philosopher lived in extremely turbulent times, not unlike the ones we find ourselves today. He saw the divisions between Lutherans and Romanists which were tearing Europe apart at the time as symptomatic of a sickness of thought and reason that infected the elites and caused them to move the masses to murder and mayhem. “Beware lest clamor be taken for counsel” was an admonition of his that could be plucked from the 14th century and slapped across every computer monitor belonging to those of us who see politics as combat and ideas as weapons.

That said, when examining what powers that the executive branch of the federal government has gathered unto itself under the Bush Administration and whether this concentration of power is dangerous, it becomes necessary to look past the hagiographic rhetoric of the right and venomous bombast of the left in order to arrive at a conclusion that answers the fundamental question any thinking citizen of the United States should be asking; is it necessary to insure the security of the United States that we lose so much of our liberty?

Make no mistake. The Bush Administration, in the name of protecting us from the evil designs of our enemies, has asserted Presidential prerogatives and has at its disposal the technological means to seriously threaten many of the liberties we have taken for granted for more than 200 years.

I hasten to add that this does not mean that those liberties have, in fact, been violated. Only that the potential is there for national security bureaucrats to trample on some of the most cherished rights that have sustained this republic since its founding. Good intentions are not enough. Motives are irrelevant when dealing with the enormous power of the executive branch to violate our privacy, to peer into the most personal and precious aspects of our lives. The fact that corporations are now doing this with an ever growing sense of impunity is extremely troubling but an entirely different issue. When done in the name of national security, the government’s efforts to snoop take on the veneer of oppression if not in strict definition then certainly in spirit. Albert Camus said ” The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” People who believe themselves to be acting as patriots or in the public good are just as dangerous as those who would use something like the NSA intercept program for nefarious purposes.

Since we will never know all the details of how the intercept program works, it will be impossible for anyone – left or right – to make a definitive determination as to whether or not the program violates the law. Humility is truth. But the question of its constitutionality is a different matter. In that respect, the issue is ambiguous enough that the exercise of authority by the President granted by both tradition and precedent would seem to indicate that George Bush is well within his rights to carry on with such activities. Not being a lawyer, I can only judge such a thing by what I read. And I find the arguments about the program’s constitutionality much more persuasive than those who argue that the President has no such power vouchsafed him by our Basic Law. Looking at history, a President’s power has always been pretty much what he says it is with significant exceptions. For those, the Congress and the Courts exercise their powers to rein in Presidential overreach. This is the essence of the separation of powers doctrine as I understand it and I believe that history bears me out on this.

So despite unanswerable questions about the project’s technical workings, there is a a strong – perhaps overwhelming – case to be made that the NSA intercept program is a lawful exercise of Presidential authority. That said, in order to answer the fundamental question regarding the accumulation of executive power under President Bush, one must look at the totality of actions taken by the Administration in the name of national security. And in this respect, there are very troubling indications that the President has gone too far in trying to secure the nation from a terrorist attack.

I say this not as a civil liberties absolutist but as someone who has been trying to come to grips with what can best be described as this Administration’s single mindedness about security and its impact on both the separation of powers and the personal liberty of individual Americans. I am deeply troubled by what I see as an incrementalist approach to the legitimate questions of our security and freedom. Take a little here, a little there, and before you know it, the executive branch has trespassed into areas that are not their province nor their business.

I am more than willing to trade a little “non essential” liberty for more security. Any rational person would be. What I am not willing to do is support the efforts of this Administration to rationalize the invasions of privacy, the warrantless searches, the indefinite detention of US citizens and legal aliens, the rejection of restrictions on interrogation procedures found in international treaties, and granting the national security state vastly expanded powers to gather domestic intelligence – all in the name of securing the homeland – without more specific approval from the Congress.

I can understand the give and take, the tug of war if you will that occurs between an executive branch that seeks to define its own authority to take action in the name of security and Congress and the Courts who either give their assent or seek to rein in these powers through legislation or judicial decisions.

But the absolute necessity for secrecy like that surrounding the NSA intercept program as well as actions taken by the FBI and DHS to protect us has created a culture that is accountable only to their own good intentions.

And that, from my point of view is totally unacceptable.

Time and again we have seen instances where Congress has either failed to act or has acceded to the Administration’s interpretation of the exercise of executive power without knowing all the facts. We’ve seen it with the prisoner issue and the refusal by Congress to clearly define the rights of those being held as enemy combatants. We have seen American citizens mistakenly picked up in dragnets and held for months at a time with no contact allowed with family or their attorney. There is the case of Cyrus Carr, an American citizen, held in Iraq for almost a year, despite being cleared within a few months of his incarceration. Then there was the anarchist jailed for linking bomb making sites on his webpage. He took a plea deal because he feared the prosecutor would bring him up on terrorism charges which could have added 20 years to his sentence.

These are not isolated incidents. And whether or not you think the people involved deserved what they got is irrelevant; what they deserved were the same protections that you and I enjoy under the Constitution. If you do not believe that, then I pray a day never arrives where your beliefs and politics are placed under similar threat. By limiting freedom for some, we limit it for all. And while I recognize that wide latitude must be given the government – especially in these extremely dangerous times – there simply must be limits. And those limits must be decided by the Congress and the courts.

If this all sounds as if I am of two minds regarding the clash between our liberty and security, you are correct. But in the end, I am taking the position that the Administration has overextended itself and is posing a threat to some of our most cherished freedoms. Perhaps some real good can come out of the examination of the NSA intercept program in Congress if it initiates a serious discussion of the issues that I’ve raised. I am not hopeful given the partisan political climate that surrounds these issues. But even the kind of rank partisanship demonstrated by members can be useful if it reveals some essential truths about what we as a people should be doing to protect ourselves from an enemy that seeks to destroy us.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin discusses the author who inspired this post – Ben Franklin. Franklin’s admonition about liberty and security (which has been hijacked and distorted by the far left) was given in the spirit of his times. This was a period in American history that featured an almost unreasoning fear that the country would degenerate into an authoritarian monarchy or just as bad, a “mobocracy” where Congress and the President would be beholden to a rampaging citizenry who would trample individual rights.

We must look to our own times for the answers to our questions. Franklin’s Philadelphia was not threatened by nuclear or biological weapons. Nor were Franklin’s conversations in danger of being recorded or his “private space” so necessary to the flourishing of liberty in danger of being intruded upon. And I’m sure Franklin’s definition of what was “essential” about liberty was very much narrower than our own.

That said, Franklin had a point; it’s easy to define security. But what liberties are truly “essential?” Here Hamlet best guides us: “To Thine own self be true.”