The Bureaucracy Did It

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank expresses doubts about the claim that the president didn’t know until recently about NSA spying activities involving other countries’ leaders.  “It strains credulity to think that the U.S. was spying on world leaders without the president’s knowledge,” Milbank wrote.  He is not alone in his skepticism.  I, on the other hand – given the size, power, complexity, and self-preservation instincts of your average government bureaucracy, particularly those involved in any way with national security – would be amazed if the president did know what was going on.  This president or any president.

The NSA wasn’t tapping into Angela Merkel’s cell phone chats because it was trying to gather intelligence that would help defend the United States.  It was tapping into her phone because it could.  What spy organizations are capable of doing, they do.  And they may or may not tell anyone about it.  Imagine NSA operatives (or whatever you call them) upon discovering, as the technology evolved, that they could listen in on the conversations of the world’s heads of state, including those of our allies:  “It’s so cool that we can do that, but it wouldn’t be right and there’s nothing to be gained from it.  So even though we can, we won’t.”

Um, no.

Given the bazillion things the NSA watches, listens to, and otherwise monitors, and given the fact that it’s a vast bureaucracy whose job is (a) spying, and (b) keeping secrets, it is entirely plausible that it was listening to plenty of people, heads of state included, without telling the president or anybody else.  Milbank quotes an AP reporter asking the question, “Was the president kept out of the loop about what the NSA was doing?” The answer is yes, in a manner of speaking. But I would suggest that there is no loop; that NSA people decide what the president, and, for that matter, the congress and even their own bosses need to know when it comes to the multitude of spying activities the organization indulges in.  They don’t do this in a seditious way.  They do it in more of a this-is-nobody-else’s-business  way.

Deciding who’s going to know what is something the NSA has in common with all Washington mega-bureaucracies which all have, in effect, a life of their own.  They know that they are permanent and that politicians are, for the most part – particularly those in the executive branch – transitory.  The bureaucrats know that long after the president and his minions have departed the scene and turned their attention to foundations and libraries, they and their impenetrable machinery will still be there.  They listen and smile as politicians vow to end waste, fraud, and abuse, and then they get back to business.  Job One for them is not serving the needs of the American people, but self preservation and perpetuation. Just as an example of how big, powerful, and immovable these agencies are, the smallest of the cabinet-level departments, Education, has 5,000 employees and a budget of about $70-billion.  The president doesn’t spend his evenings going over DOE’s contracts.  The idea that the congress and/or the executive branch are on top of everything the bureaucracies are doing is an illusion.  (They tend to be on top of those matters only insofar as they can influence spending that benefits their friends, relatives, contributors, and, ultimately, themselves.)

Republicans and other irrational Obama-haters aren’t sure which rap to try to pin on Obama to get the most political mileage out of this spying affair: Spying on friends? Spying on friends but not knowing about it?  Spying on friends, knowing about it, but lying about knowing about it.  You can pick only one.  The likely reality, though, is that friends were pointlessly spied on but it wasn’t the president’s fault.  The bureaucracy did it.  Meanwhile, what we’re all pretty sure of is that everybody spies on everybody else and that foreign politicians, allies of the U.S. or not, whether they're tapping the U.S. president's phone or not, know they’ll never lose any votes by vowing to their constituents that they won’t stand still for being pushed around by America.