California Conservative

Here’s a tip of the hat to Joe Klein for his excellent Time Magazine article on national security. Here’s a sampling of that writing:

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, engaged in a small but cheesy bit of deception last week. She released a letter, which quickly found its way to the front page of the New York Times, that she had written on Oct. 11, 2001, to then National Security Agency director General Michael V. Hayden. In it she expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with “specific presidential authorization.” Hayden wrote her back that he was acting under the powers granted to his agency in a 1981 Executive Order. In fact, a 2002 investigation by the Joint Intelligence Committees concluded that the NSA was not doing as much as it could have been doing under the law, and that the entire U.S. intelligence community operated in a hypercautious defensive crouch. “Hayden was taking reasonable steps,” a former committee member told me. “Our biggest concern was what more he could be doing.”

Rather than sounding alarmed at the overreach of the NSA, as Sen. Kennedy alleges on an almost daily basis, the reverse is true, according to both Gen. Hayden and a 2002 “investigation by the Joint Intelligence Committees…” That paints a picture that should be brought to everyone’s attention.

In fact, I wish someone would rebuke Kennedy on the Senate floor on this issue. I doubt that he’d stop making these outlandish statements but, in doing so, he’d be shredding what little is left of his credibility.

The release of Pelosi’s letter last week and the subsequent Times story (”Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show”) left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn’t exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, “Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it’s all fruit.”

A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are “fruit,” and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality, spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders.

Clearly, congressional Democrats see any attempt by President Bush to use his inherent powers as established by the Constitution as a power grab, even if those powers have been upheld by the courts. Clearly, their distrust of executive power is traced back to the Nixon administration abuses.

Unfortunately, they see everything through the prism of Watergate cynicism instead of noticing the differences between the abuses then and the necessity now. It’s also obvious that they don’t take into account the need to protect lives. They only see the need to ‘protect our rights’.

Don’t get me wrong. I want my rights protected but I’m also willing to theoretically have those rights trimmed slightly back if it’ll help prevent future 9/11’s. And I’d make that decision in a heartbeat.

It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations. There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them, but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

Protecting American citizens is the first responsibility of a Commander-in-Chief. For him not to use the tools at our avail would’ve needlessly put our lives at risk. Thank God President Bush did what he did.

As for the NY Times breaking this story, I’ll hold them personally responsible if their ‘reporting’ leads to any more attacks on Americans, whether it’s foreign or abroad.

Pelosi made clear to me that she considered Hayden, now Deputy Director of National Intelligence, an honorable man who would not overstep his bounds. “I trust him,” she said. “I haven’t accused him of anything. I was, and remain, concerned that he has the proper authority to do what he is doing.” A legitimate concern, but the Democrats are on thin ice here. Some of the wilder donkeys talked about a possible Bush impeachment after the NSA program was revealed.

The notion that Ms. Pelosi’s out shooting her mouth off that President Bush overstepped his authority in public while privately agreeing with him is inexcusable. What’s worse is that ideologues like John Conyers and Maxine Waters think President Bush should be impeached. That’s beyond reckless.

The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known. In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo’s family in the right-to-die case last year.

Liberals are further from the American mainstream on this than any issue I’ve seen debated in the past 15+ years. That’s why they’ll stay far from power.

As a sidenote, the reality is that Democrats will turn on Harry Reid next fall when campaign commercial after campaign commercial will be made of Dingy Harry’s “We killed the Patriot Act” pronouncement on Dec. 16, 2005. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Elections, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Law, Pelosi, Terrorism, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.