One for the record books

A few major landmarks of late have gone uncelebrated.

For one, a major milestone in Iraq passed yesterday: The 1,348th day of combat. Why is this significant? It means our commitment in Iraq has now surpassed the length of the United States' involvement in World War II (Dec. 7, 1941 to Aug. 15, 1945). Operation Iraqi Freedom is now our fourth longest war, trailing only Vietnam, the American Revolution and the American Civil War.

Maybe this news was overshadowed by the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (no balloon accidents this year!). Or the hard-hitting news that Gerald Ford is now the oldest ex-president ever. In any case, as many have noted, the recently resigned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld '54 turned out to be the world's worst Nostradamus impersonator when he estimated, back in November 2002, that the war would last "five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that." As he famously concluded, "It won't be a World War III."

Elsewhere in the world, other major milestones have passed. The cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom recently surpassed $300 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. This is, of course, six times higher than the White House's initial projected budget for the war: less than $50 billion. Don't break out the champagne just yet though — wait until the costs reach that accomplished $2 trillion mark, as some economists predict will happen between 2010 and 2015.

These are actions abroad — staying, spending — that have generally outstayed their welcome, at least according to some interpretations of the results of the recent midterm elections. But back at home, there's an unwelcome inaction that's also hit a nasty milestone.

Nearly a year ago, the New York Times first broke the story that the National Security Agency (NSA) was monitoring thousands of phone calls and emails made by Americans without the warrants required for legal domestic spying. The NSA began the program under a secret order from George Bush months after 9/11, in violation of the (already very lenient) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

There were bursts of outrage immediately after the Times' revelations, both from citizens opposed to the government's Orwellian, illegal spying, and from Department of Justice officials and their cohorts opposed to the paper's coverage of a classified and controversial program. Senators and congressmen from both parties decried the program's lack of constitutionality, including even Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Some called for impeachment. Other politicians declared the wiretapping nearly legal, just barely judicious enough that the law should be amended to make the NSA's actions more expressly legal. Washington politicos have fought over everything from oversight to investigations to the PR spin ("illegal wiretapping" vs. "terrorist surveillance").

But all that initial huffing and puffing has faded into hemming and hawing.

Nearly 12 months have passed and not so much as an investigation into the legality of the NSA program has commenced. "We've had a wasted year at this point," a former senior intelligence official recently told The New York Times, "and nothing has been done to try to really figure out how or whether we should amend the process."

The only court decision on the wiretapping found that the NSA's activities were unconstitutional, in a case brought by civil rights groups in a Detroit Federal District Court. But, as the Times reports, the "wiretapping program continues uninterrupted, with no definitive action by either Congress or the courts on what, if anything, to do about it, and little chance of a breakthrough in the lame-duck Congress."

Politicians are too afraid of being accused of hindering the war on terrorism, of allowing the White House to symbolically align the program's opponents with terrorists rather than with the Fourth Amendment. Instead of limits on these unconstitutional actions, more privacy breaches have occurred (or at least have been revealed), with the reporting on the U.S. government's data mining of Americans' phone records and financial transactions, facilitated by various phone companies and an international banking consortium. And meanwhile the White House has been pushing legislation through the lame duck Congress that would legalize the warrantless wiretapping.

It's about time now for our Washington representatives to put down the political posturing and realize they have a Constitution to protect, to resist the scaremongering and stand up for civil rights. That, my friends, would surely be something for the record books. Catherine Rampell '07 is an anthropology major from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.