NSA controversy: Should James Clapper go or stay?

The revelation that the government has been acquiring vast quantities of telephone records of U.S. citizens has put a bull’s eye on the back of Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who has outed himself as the source of that information. But it also has led to calls for the resignation of the director of national intelligence, retired Air Force Gen. James R. Clapper, who is accused of lying to Congress about the electronic dragnet.

At a public hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the secrecy surrounding anti-terrorism activities, asked Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied: “No sir … not wittingly.”

This wasn’t a case of a witness being ambushed by an unexpected question that caused him to misspeak. Wyden told the New York Times that he had sent the question to Clapper’s office a day before the hearing, and later gave Clapper’s staff an opportunity to correct his statement.

MCMANUS: Head-in-the-sand Congress

After it was revealed that the National Security Agency in fact has been scooping up metadata about Americans’ phone calls -- sources, destinations and duration, but not the contents of conversations -- Clapper was asked about his testimony. He offered this explanation: “I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ... What I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers — of those books in that metaphorical library — to me, collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.

Jay Carney, President Obama’s press secretary, insists that Clapper has been “straight and direct in the answers he’s given,” and has been “aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press, about this very important, very sensitive program.”

Critics, however, say Clapper should step down. “There are many ways that he could have finessed the question, as administration witnesses have done in such settings for decades,” Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, “but Clapper chose simply to lie.” Kaplan added that “if President Obama really welcomes an open debate on this subject, James Clapper has disqualified himself from participation in it. He has to go.”

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