Feb. 8, 2006 - Sen. Joseph Biden was uncharacteristically succinct. "How will we know when this war is over?" Biden asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday at a Senate hearing on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Biden never really got a good answer, but his question still resonates. The Bush administration calls the war on terror "the long war." But if we are to take the president and his aides at their word, it is more like a permanent war, one that by definition can never end. Having identified the enemy as Al Qaeda and its "affiliates"—at a time when angry young Muslims are boiling up all over, to be recruited by terror cells yet unborn—the administration surely knows it will be a long, long time until all the Islamist bad guys are eliminated. And that means the extraordinary powers that George W. Bush has arrogated to himself "during wartime"—including the surveillance of Americans—could become permanent as well.
It all sounds frighteningly Orwellian. But the truth is that, for all the hue and cry over American civil liberties, we are a long way from Big Brother today. In fact, we could probably use a little more Big Brother about now. After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn’t learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms.
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