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Jihadis and Wiretaps and Moonbats! Oh, My! (Updated)
I'm combining my NSA_Wiretaps and CIA/NSA Treason threads from here out. They're too intertwined to try to keep separate and I'm not even sure at this point that the wiretaps leak(s) came from within the CIA or NSA.
William Kristol:
The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism
No reasonable American, no decent human being, wants to send up a white flag in the war on terror. But leading spokesmen for American liberalism-hostile beyond reason to the Bush administration, and ready to believe the worst about American public servants-seem to have concluded that the terror threat is mostly imaginary. It is the threat to civil liberties from George W. Bush that is the real danger. These liberals recoil unthinkingly from the obvious fact that our national security requires policies that are a step (but only a careful step) removed from ACLU dogma.
On Monday, December 19, General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, briefed journalists. The back--and--forth included this exchange:
[Read the whole thing here.]
Yup. First the Bush administration will listen in to international communications of a few hundred people in America who seem to have been in touch with terrorists abroad . . . and next thing you know, government hit squads will be killing George W. Bush's political opponents.
What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.
Michael Barone:
The New York Times' Christmas Gift
The New York Times' Christmas gift -- sorry, holiday gift -- to the nation's political dialogue was its Dec. 16 story reporting that the National Security Agency has been intercepting telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States.
What the Times didn't bother telling its readers is that this practice is far from new and is entirely legal. Instead, the unspoken subtext of the story was that this was likely an illegal and certainly a very scary invasion of Americans' rights.
Let's put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America's enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say that the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America's enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.
[Read on here.]
Thomas Lifson:
The New York Times Intelligence Scandal
The New York Times and the Democrat Left (the overlap is considerable) have gone into water that may be deeper than they suspect, with the printing of a year-old story based on intelligence leaks, on the very day the Senate voted on cloture for renewing the USA Patriot Act. Democrats are now on the hook for weakening our ability to prevent another 9/11. We hope and trust this failure will be rectified quickly.
[Read the whole thing here.]
Now that the Plame case has established that leaking secrets from the CIA is a crime, and that reporters may be jailed if they refuse to give up their sources, some chickens may well be coming home to roost. It is far too soon for AT to lay out where we think this case may be going, but we think the President’s skill as a poker player, one who knows how to encourage his opponents to bet on a losing hand, is at work once again.
People who pay attention to media spin may think the President is in trouble. We don’t. The fat lady isn’t even to close to singing the finale of this case. Stay tuned.
Clarice Feldman:
Round up the obvious suspects
Liberal fantasies of Karl Rove being frog-marched in handcuffs for leaking classified information may turn into a nightmare of prominent liberals being prosecuted for damaging the fight against al Qaeda via leaks of classified data. There are no names on the public record yet, but somebody leaked the classified information about NSA surveillance to James Risen of the New York Times, and a year later his paper published the story.
The pieces falling in place are far from conclusive, but they are mighty suggestive.
[Read the whole thing here.]
... A. J. Strata has a starting point suggestion about the leakers. He notes this graph from the NYT: “According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency’s new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.”
It does seem to suggest that Senator Rockefeller and ”a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters” were sources for this leak, Strata hints. In fact, if Strata is right, Gonzales may already know that, for Strata adds that press reports to the contrary notwithstanding, Judge Robertson, an activist liberal judge, probably didn’t “resign,” but rather was suspended for that very reason.
See also: The Liberal Cabal Against Bush
The Case For Spying
At this point I don't really care who's been passing classified information to the papers. I want them arrested, tried, and shot, the sooner the better.
*** 2005-12-27 PM Update:
Secret court modified wiretap requests
Intervention may have led Bush to bypass panel
WASHINGTON -- Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.
The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an acknowledged authority on the supersecret NSA, which intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications.
[Read on here.]
Dafydd ab Hugh isn't buying that explanation at all:
Maybe This Explains It? UPDATED
A UPI report -- if true -- may actually give us some insight into why Bush bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and ordered, using his own plenary power as president, the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept foreign-based phone calls and e-mails to known al-Qaeda affiliates and to analyze the traffic patterns of such electronic communications: [...]
[...]
Nearly all of these demands (97%) occurred in 2003 and 2004, a year after Bush began the NSA program; so Bush's order was clearly not a reaction to being rebuffed, as the newsies will doubtless try to spin it (including UPI above: the court was not yet "challenging him at an unprecedented rate" in 2002, when he made the decision).
But the most plausible explanation to me is that Bush realized we would need vastly increased surveillance of known or suspected terrorists operating within the United States and communicating to al-Qaeda agents abroad... and the president rightly suspected that the plain inertia of the court meant it would forever be a "September-10th" body, unable to deal with the September-11th world in which we now live.
[Read Dafydd's entire post here.]
The simple fact, friends, is that the President knew he didn't need the FISA courts permission to do what needed done to begin with, so he went ahead and did it. The only question I'm left with is why he even bothered to ask for warrants afterwards.
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