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Townhall
The
Loss of Trust
By Thomas Sowell
Jun 18, 2013
Amid
all the heated cross-currents
of debate about the National Security Agency's massive surveillance
program,
there is a growing distrust of the Obama administration that makes
weighing the
costs and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to assess.
The
belated recognition of this
administration's contempt for the truth, for the American people and
for the
Constitution of the United States, has been long overdue.
But
what if the NSA program has in
fact thwarted terrorists and saved many American lives in ways that
cannot be
revealed publicly?
Nothing
is easier than saying that
you still don't want your telephone records collected by the
government. But
the first time you have to collect the remains of your loved ones,
after they
have been killed by terrorists, telephone records can suddenly seem
like a
small price to pay to prevent such things.
The
millions of records of phone
calls collected every day virtually guarantee that nobody has the time
to
listen to them all, even if NSA could get a judge to authorize
listening to
what is said in all these calls, instead of just keeping a record of
who called
whom.
Moreover,
Congressional oversight
by members of both political parties limits what Barack Obama or any
other
president can get away with.
Are
these safeguards foolproof? No.
Nothing is ever foolproof.
As
Edmund Burke said, more than two
centuries ago: "Constitute government how you please, infinitely the
greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which
are left
at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state."
In
other words, we do not have a
choice whether to trust or not to trust government officials. Unless we
are
willing to risk anarchy or terrorism, the most we can do is set up
checks and
balances within government -- and be a lot more careful in the future
than we
have been in the past when deciding whom to elect.
Anyone
old enough to remember the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy took this
country
to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, may remember that
there was
nothing like the distrust and backlash against later presidents, whose
controversial decisions risked nothing approaching the cataclysm that
President
Kennedy's decision could have led to…
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall
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