Anyone who has raised children is probably familiar with the old saw that "the best defense is a good offense." Anyone who has raised children has probably seen this in action. It is a variation on a particular defense that people use to avoid bad feelings, especially shame and guilt.
Usually, this defense is rushed into action when the child is caught in the act of misbehaving. In effect, the child transforms their injured pride, guilt, and/or shame, into anger at the person who makes them feel bad. In this way they attempt to avoid responsibility for the act itself and move the discussion away from their own, often indefensible, behavior to a more comfortable arena in which their anger can cover their injured pride, guilt, and shame. A good example would be the adolescent caught with marijuana or alcohol in their room. By immediately attacking the parent for "spying" on them, they hope to shift the discussion away from their guilt and shame, and at least mitigate it by creating a moral equivalency with the parent's guilt.
Apparently newspapers and political parties can do this, too.
On Friday, the New York Times once again decided they know what is best for the our national security and disclosed potentially damaging secrets on their front page for narrow political, and financial, advantage.
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
When the President angrily spoke out against those who would endanger our national security for their own ends, the Times went on the attack. In their editorial, This Call May Be Monitored ..., from yesterday's paper, the Times sank to new lows:
This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.
The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that American citizens' communications may be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they must be thrown out.
President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Here, the New York Times brings us a new definition for "Chutzpah". The Times screamed louder than most for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the supposed leak of Valerie Plame's name when they thought it would implicate Karl Rove, then suddenly developed amnestic laryngitis when it looked like reporters were in danger, only to then find their voice once more when Lewis Libby was indicted for lying to a grand jury (not for leaking, mind you). After crusading for those who leak secrets to be prosecuted to the limits of the law, all of a sudden, the Times finds "leaked" secrets it can use to advance its agenda and uses the leaked intelligence to scuttle a bill to extend the Patriot Act, diminish the coverage of the Iraq election, and to push a book in which they have a financial stake; they then cap it off by making the pious claim that it is Mr. Bush's team that cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law. Aside from the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Times, their disregard for national security, and their situational regard for the law, the attempt to use jujitsu to turn a shameful behavior into an attack is obvious.
A few points of clarification are useful. First, according to Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former NSA head 1977-81 during the Carter administration, in an interview on NPR this morning, getting the FISA courts to grant a warrant, while not terribly difficult, usually takes "only a few days," though the Times claims only a few hours. Since Inman, a Carter appointee who has no particular love of the Bush administration, was head of the NSA, I suspect he is more correct than the Times. Of course, often a few days, perhaps hours, the terrorists typically are no longer using the same cell phone that the warrant would cover. As well, terrorists these days do not usually supply us long lead times for attacks; when we hear "chatter" we had better be able to monitor ASAP; failure to do so makes disasters much more likely. Furthermore, when we are trying to take down a distributed network of terrorists, there may be dozens or hundreds of numbers that need to be monitored. This is problematic for a court to deal with. The Times ought to at least admit that their approach, demanding absolute inviolability of communications without a warrant, is risky.
At the end of their editorial, after some further ad hominem attacks on the Bush administration, The Times states that since Bush won't halt the program he believes is legal and important, that the Congress should force him to stop. The last line of the editorial is a classic:
Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling.
Yesterday on Fox New Sunday, Harry Reid, when asked repeatedly whether he had been briefed on he program, finally admitted he had indeed been told of it "several months" ago.
[I would like to go on record saying that I do not believe the Democrats were left out of the loop on this. The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (please no jokes about oxymorons) were briefed about all aspects of our intelligence and many have admitted they never read the reports they were given. I suspect Harry Reid has either "forgotten" about past briefings or never read the material he was given. However, even if I grant that he knew nothing about the program until a few months ago (he never denied other Democrats were briefed), his response, that this is a White House program and therefore, their problem, was deeply non-serious, at best.]
The very Democrats the Times pushes so assiduously have known about the program and said nothing because they are either moral cowards without the courage of their lack of convictions, or because they calculated it would not be politically expedient to oppose an effort that is successfully protecting Americans.
According to Inman, and as should be obvious to almost anyone who has the ability to think critically without being blinded by ideology, the NSA has monitored communications since the late 1940's when it was set up. Roger Simon describes the reaction many people had to the revelation:
If there is any kernel of truth in this "shocking" revelation it is that Bush - after 9/11 - reminded (or endorsed) the NSA to do what he and every other President knew they were already doing. In other words, he was just trying to make sure someone was listening in when the next Mohammed Atta called home. Wouldn't you? (Well, it's not pretty, but I would wager most of us would in the President's position - no matter what our political party.)
I would take it a step further; any President who stopped such a program would be derelict in his duty and impeachable if another 9/11 occurred. Today, the New York Post, a tabloid which has the virtue of being honest about its biases, has an article describing the probable outcome of a "small" nuclear (fission) bomb attack in New York City. While the odds of such an attack succeeding may be low (and almost impossible to quantify), our enemies would not hesitate to do it and that should be kept in mind when you hear self-righteous politicians and so-called civil liberties proponents complain about the violations of the FISA act:
FEDS PAINT APPLE DOOMSDAY SCENARIO
By SUSAN EDELMAN
Cham Dallas, director of the federally funded Center for Mass Destruction Defense, discussed his conclusions at a Nov. 10 closed hearing of a congressional panel. He showed lawmakers data predicting 1.6 million New Yorkers could be killed, maimed, burned or sickened if a 20-kiloton nuke exploded at Broadway and Warren Street downtown.
"We are not prepared for the 100,000 burn victims," Dallas said. "It will be a picture out of Dante's 'Inferno,' with all these people screaming in agony for days, and you won't have enough people there to help them."
A bomb that size, similar to the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is considered "relatively small" by today's standards for thermonuclear weapons, and could be detonated from the back of "a small rental truck or even a van," Dallas said.
Read it all; it is not pretty.
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has more on Democratic hypocrisy.
AJStrata has more on Reid's pathetic performance on Sunday.
Captain's Quarters has more on the New York Times, at the very least, slanting their description of the program and the FISA act.
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