President Bush's action in turning the National Security Agency loose to record American citizens' telephone calls and e-mails without following the law governing such matters is now being made subject by Mr. Bush to the usual administration smokescreen of lies and investigations that the public has come to expect when something bad the White House has done meets the light of day.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

It is thus probably time to take a close look at what is occurring, to try to keep our eyes on the ball as Mr. Bush and his spinners kick dust at us.

First of all, no one is arguing that NSA shouldn't bug potential terrorists, nor that the CIA and the FBI shouldn't keep files on these people. In light of the blunders by the CIA and the FBI in the run-up to the Sept. 11 attacks, it would be clear folly not to.

But that isn't what this is about. What it is about is that there has been in effect since Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which dictates the circumstances under which such bugging becomes legal -- as opposed to an arbitrary abuse of executive branch power.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ever been slow in granting such authority, nor that any targets of opportunity have ever been missed because of its actions.

What the existence of the law and the procedure is supposed to prevent is that a president -- since 1978 we have had five -- wakes up one fine morning and decides it might be fun to know what his political enemies -- or even imagined enemies -- might be saying to other people in phone calls and e-mails, and tells the NSA to begin monitoring their communications.

I will leave it to those with a taste for recent history to imagine who might be considered the political enemies of those five American presidents. Each had some. The fact that the name of whoever the political enemy in question might be would have to be submitted to the FISA court has been an element -- until George W. Bush's presidency -- in preventing any of them from succumbing to such a temptation.

How Mr. Bush decided that it was acceptable for him simply to ignore the 27-year-old law and just order the surveillance to begin -- and, presumably, to continue, since we haven't heard yet that he has ordered non-court-sanctioned NSA monitoring to end -- remains to come out.

He claims that the nebulous post-9/11 congressional resolution that he says authorized him to make war on America's enemies superseded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as law that he as president is required to observe and respect.

We will pass over in silence the question of whether the "war" on terrorism is a war and if "terrorism" is an identifiable enemy against which the United States can wage war and stay within the bounds of logic. We will also leave aside the question of whether the undeclared war in Iraq is one that justifies the bypassing of a law that is essential to the protection of Americans' civil rights.

I am not building up to an argument for impeaching Mr. Bush because of his violation of an important U.S. law. I think there is no chance whatsoever that a Congress, both houses of which are controlled by Mr. Bush's party, would even look at such an action. In my view, the effort to impeach President Clinton was a major waste of time, even though his actions that led to it were certainly deplorable. There is also the truly frightful prospect that, if, by hook or by crook Mr. Bush were successfully impeached, Vice President Dick Cheney, in shaky health, would become president.

Then we come to the question of the administration's response to being called to account -- notably by The New York Times -- for its violations of the law in conducting surveillance of Americans' private communications. Mr. Bush says that there will be an investigation of those who leaked the fact of the existence of the program to the media.

As part of that investigation there will be, perforce, close scrutiny of those members of the media to whom whoever did the leaking, leaked. Now where have we heard this before? Some person or persons in the White House may have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in telling various journalists the identity and position of CIA officer Valerie Plame, to get even with her husband for having revealed a falsehood that Mr. Bush deliberately or inadvertently told in his 2003 State of the Union message about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa.

The only person who has gone to jail so far in the Valerie Plame case is New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in the slammer for refusing to reveal who gave her Valerie Plame's name and position. In the event it turned out to be I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr., Vice President Cheney's now former chief of staff, who is facing trial on five charges.

The role in the affair of Mr. Bush's own senior political counselor, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, has yet to result in any charges, although -- despite the current ringing silence in the case -- it may be that Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald still may be seeking to indict Mr. Rove.

Rumblings from inside The New York Times, notably by its Public Editor Byron Calame in a column Sunday, suggest that that paper may have considered itself to have been sufficiently badly burned by the Plame-Miller affair to have withheld what it knew about NSA bugging Americans for as much as a year, knowing that the administration would smear it with treason insinuations if it printed even some of what it knew about the NSA program.

In any case, some of it is out now. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings on the matter early this year. The American public is still waiting to hear that Mr. Bush has instructed the NSA to stop bugging people it doesn't have court orders for until the required orders are obtained. Nor has it instructed the Pentagon to destroy its files on Americans involved in demonstrations -- animal rights, peace, anti-Iraq war -- after three months, as required.

Mr. Bush cites war as the basis for breaking the law. The question is, war on whom? Could it not equally well be argued that the most credible threat to Americans' liberties comes from its leaders who break its laws?