Why did it take me so long to figure out the interview tactics of politicians and pundits without a strong argument?
Watching “Flashpoints USA” tonight on PBS, I came to the realization during a Bryant Gumbel interview with Viet Dinh, the principal architect of the PATRIOT Act. He recited doctrine as if he were reading it off a teleprompter. When confronted with the ways the Act destroys civil liberties by Professor David Cole, he responded by jabbering on with a rambling statement that not only did not address Professor Cole’s claims, but really made no sense at all.
Professor Cole complained that:
It imposes guilt by association on foreign nationals. It authorizes excluding foreign nationals based solely and purely on their speech. It gives the Attorney General authority to lock up foreign nationals on his say so with out showing that they are dangerous. It gives the government the ability to spy on its citizens and on foreign nationals without probable cause of a crime, to get wiretaps and warrants. It gives them the ability to get records from libraries and book stores on people who are not targets of any criminal investigation, who are not targets of any foreign intelligence investigation and who are not suspected of engaging in any illegal activity.
To my mind, a concise enumeration of problems with the Act. Professor Dinh responds with this obstruse speech:
There is a lot of smoke there and I respect that David profoundly. But there are some errors in statement because the law is indeed long, it is very complicated by the time congress got through with it. It was contrary to Professor Cole’s assertion Congress was very involved with process in refining, adding and in some times deleting some of our proposals. Most significant of which is all of the protections that existed prior to the USA Patriot Act as it relates to judicial approval, as it relates to the predication of surveillance all exist after the United States congress passed the USA Patriot Act. Congress and the administration was very careful to preserve the same level of control over governmental surveillance and conduct with the USA Patriot act. The USA Patriot Act served a very, very central purpose. That is to update the law to the technology so that the terrorists and other criminals with criminal and harmful intent can not evade investigations simply by switching cell phone or changing from phone to internet. And likewise and much more significantly, Congress allowed for the criminal investigators to communicate with our intelligence investigators and vice versa. So when all hands are on deck, in order to fight the common fight against terrorism the right hand knows what the left hand is doing so that we can coordinate action collaborate our information contrary to the law of separation that existed prior to the USA Patriot Act.
Huh?
Bizarrely enough, Bryant Gumbel, perhaps not wanting to appear dumb, said:
Understood.
In the era of television soundbites, these people have learned to say nothing at all, but take up as much valuable air time saying it as possible, knowing that the clock is ticking and the anchor will not go over the allotted time by trying to get a real answer.
It’s so obvious – why didn’t I get this before?
