What Do Those Polls Really Mean?

It all started with a Rasmussen Reports poll that shows that 64% of Americans support eavesdropping on terrorists, even when that eavesdropping includes warrantless searches. Ace of Spades was quick to point out the significance of the polling. Despite big media outlets pounding the message that these searches constitute a grave and gathering threat to civil rights of Americans and potentially impeachable offenses against the President of the US, most Americans realize that the President is simply doing his Constitutional duty to protect and defend the citizens of the United States against threats both foreign and domestic.

While there are many folks who are showing that the actions taken by the President are legal (Mark Levin and Powerline come to mind, though Cass Sunstein, John Schmidt, and Jaime Gorelick are also on the record as finding the Administration's use of warrantless searches within the powers of the President despite those searches not going through the FISA court), the big media outlets continue to pound away that these searches are illegal and that the Administration should be held accountable for those illegal actions.

What gets lost in the NYT and media coverage is that similar efforts have been undertaken by every President since Jimmy Carter was first constrained by the creation of FISA in 1978. President Carter knew that there were situations that the FISA process couldn't deal with swiftly enough for national security purposes, and therefore went ahead with warrantless searches anyway. Every president since then engaged in similar methods though President Clinton even extended the warrantless search to certain wholly domestic operations.

Yet the big media outlets, and specifically the New York Times have not shed light on how they actually obtained information about the NSA wiretapping and similar eavesdropping programs in the first place. Considering that the programs described in the NYT were classified programs, the leaks are violations of numerous federal laws and those leakers are criminals. These leaks threaten national security in a real and tangible way. It shows terrorists potential loopholes for exploitation and may cause some to change means of contacting cells in the US. Apparently, those concerns were not sufficient to keep this story out of the limelight.

The Times says that they sat on this story for more than a year, and that's troubling in and of itself. If this was such a violation of civil rights, don't you think that they would have released details of the program much sooner. Instead, we've learned that one of the journalists involved in the story, Eric Risen, is touting a new book and it appears that the Times was concerned about being scooped by one of its own journalists on an 'exclusive.'

This was a concerted effort to undermine the war effort, and the polling reflects this - both in terms of the pragmatic result and why the numbers weren't even higher.

Despite the media play, even 51% of Democrats support the continued surveillance of terrorists that includes warrantless eavesdropping. We're talking about communications intercepts between foreign terrorists with individuals domestically. This isn't about a political spy operation against political opponents or using the IRS to bully political opponents, but a natural and logical outgrowth over the need to protect the US against further terrorist attacks domestically by intercepting communcations between terror cells domestically and their international cohorts.

And we’re seeing some leftist bloggers complaining that the polling isn’t actually good news, but bad news. They think that support for this kind of eavesdropping should be even higher than it currently is. Do these bloggers and pundits not realize that the biased media coverage of the eavesdropping stories in the Times and elsewhere affects and skews the polling results? If all people read and hear is bad news, don’t these leftist bloggers realize that the polling will reflect the bad news.

Yet, despite the negative press in the Times and other big media sources, the high level of support for these kinds of warrantless searches against terrorists who are communicating with individuals inside the US shows that most folks still have some kind of functional common sense. Now, if the big media outlets actually noted that these kinds of warrantless searches are constitutional and justifiable on national security grounds, support would be much higher.

UPDATE:
And don't get me started on the repercussions of this information on all current and past terrorism investigations and convictions for terror-related charges. These revelations will inevitably spark challenges to every single terrorism case pursued by the Justice Department. It's yet another attempt to hamstring the war on terror.

Others blogging this important story are: Confederate Yankee, Rob at Say Anything, Sister Toldjah, Michelle Malkin, Captain Ed, Blogs For Bush, Jeff Goldstein, Political Teen, Decision ‘08, Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive’s, [and] Junkyard Blog.

UPDATE:
Generation Why wonders when the media will understand the definition of mainstream as most Americans favor this kind of spycraft to keep this nation safe from terror plots.

Also noting the polling data on approval of eavesdropping on terrorists: The Right Nation.