The President Hits Back
In his weekly radio address, President Bush lashed out at those involved in publicly revealing the program.
“This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security,” he said in a radio address delivered live from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. “This authorization is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives. The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and their civil liberties and that is exactly what I will continue to do as long as I am president of the United States,” Bush said.
With this simple paragraph, President Bush turned the spotlight on the intelligence officials that leaked this information. It was important that he said that this program was highly classified because it casts the leakers as undermining the legal efforts of his administration to protect the American people from terrorist attacks.
This should highlight for everyone to see that the intelligence community has it out for President Bush and will do anything to try and undercut him at every turn. That, as much as anything, is why a full investigation of the leakers is overdue.
Defending the program, Bush said in his address that it is used only to intercept the international communications of people inside the United States who have been determined to have “a clear link” to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations. He said the program is reviewed every 45 days, using fresh threat assessments, legal reviews by the Justice Department, White House counsel and others, and information from previous activities under the program.
Without identifying specific lawmakers, Bush said congressional leaders have been briefed more than a dozen times on the program’s activities. The president also said the intelligence officials involved in the monitoring receive extensive training to make sure civil liberties are not violated.
With those two paragraphs, President Bush said “Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Sen. Specter.” He was the first to say how upset he was with this. I’ll bet this changes things in a big way. This has been reviewed and revisited numerous times (My Minnesota math says that once every 45 days = 8X a year X 4 years = 32 times minimum.) I’d say that that’s sufficient oversight.
Further, it’s worth noting that one of the primary, if not THE primary function of the President in the Oath of Office is to protect us “from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It’s only logical to think that it’s unconstitutional for Congress to restrict the President’s ability to carry out that oath, so long as he isn’t working outside the law.
President Bush’s explanation that they’ve only done this “to intercept the international communications of people inside the United States who have been determined to have “a clear link” to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations.” It isn’t like these intercepts have happened on a hunch. Once this is explained, I suspect that 80+ percent of the American people will side with the President on this.
In the end, I hope President Bush continues this in-your-face approach when people try and curtail his ability to prosecute the GWOT, whether it’s in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world. This is the defining issue of our time and we can’t get this one wrong because getting this wrong means the end of America.
UPDATE: The AP’s Jennifer Loven included these additional quotes from President Bush’s weekly radio address:
“The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time,” Bush said. “And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad.”
Bush said his authority to approve what he called a “vital tool in our war against the terrorists” came from his constitutional powers as commander in chief. He said that he has personally signed off on reauthorizations more than 30 times. “The American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties,” Bush said. “And that is exactly what I will continue to do, so long as I’m the president of the United States.”
Beautiful. It’s great to see President Bush tell the world that his authority to conduct these wiretaps come from his war powers as commander-in-chief that the Founding Fathers anticipated when they wrote the Constitution.
Bush said leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-MI, told House Republicans that those informed were the top Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of each chamber’s intelligence committees.
This is a short paragraph but it’s vitally important because it puts the onus on these Congressmen and women as well as the President. If they knew that President Bush was breaking the law, then they had a duty to report it and to consider articles of impeachment right then and there. Otherwise, they’re complicit in these wiretaps.
Of course, that’s assuming that the wiretapes were illegal, something that I’m not willing to concede at all.
The president had harsh words for those who revealed the program to the media, saying they acted improperly and illegally.
As I said earlier, I hope this triggers a major investigation into these leakers because what they did was illegal as well as dangerous to this nation’s national security.
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing