ON OBEYING ORDERS

Nancy Soderberg is a member of the D.C. establishment and worked for the Clinton Administration. Back on July 5th, an op-ed she wrote, "A good-enough spy law," was published in the LA Times and it gives us a perfect example of how an authoritarian mind thinks. Here's one of the objectionable parts:

After much political rancor, House Republicans and Democrats came together last month and passed a compromise bill that will bring the country's surveillance laws into the 21st century, yet still protect individual civil liberties. The Senate is dragging its feet because the compromise bill's opponents -- mostly Democrats -- want also to punish the telecommunications companies that answered President Bush's order for help with his illegal, warrantless wiretapping program.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House directed telecommunications carriers to cooperate with its efforts to bolster intelligence gathering and surveillance ...

I was unaware that a President can ORDER private entities to do his bidding and Glenn Greenwald was also surprised:

I would really like to know where people like Soderberg get the idea that the U.S. President has the power to "order" private citizens to do anything, let alone to break the law, as even she admits happened here. I'm asking this literally: how did this warped and distinctly un-American mentality get implanted into our public discourse -- that the President can give "orders" to private citizens that must be complied with? Soderberg views the President as a monarch -- someone who can issue "orders" that must be obeyed, even when, as she acknowledges, the "orders" are illegal.

Soderberg herself seems confused about this issue because toward the end of her piece, she writes of cooperation instead of obedience:

Without such protection, phone and Internet companies, if they cooperated at all, would do so on a case-by-case basis, with their own lawyers exercising lawyer-like caution.

Proponents are right too in seeking to ensure the continued cooperation of the telecommunications industry in the war on terrorism.

One doesn't cooperate with an order, one obeys or disobeys it.