| New Dem Spin: "Whistleblowers", Not Leakers |
|
January 3, 2006 |
|
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
|
 |
|
RUSH: A New York Times story from January 1st: "A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program. The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides," Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales, "to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft..." Now, first observation is: None of this matters. If it's constitutional, it's constitutional. So it doesn't matter if James Comey or John Ashcroft or anybody else disagreed with it or didn't want to sign on to it. If it's constitutional, it's constitutional, but the main point about this is look at the lengths that they went to.
I mean, if this were an administration that were hell-bent on secrecy and violating everybody's civil liberties and didn't care a whit about the privacy of the Constitution, well, they wouldn't have made these efforts -- and they even suspended the program for a while they were trying to get this sorted out. Finally the president said, "You know what? I agree with Jamie Gorelick. I have inherent constitutional authority." So much ado about nothing continues with this. I also got an interesting e-mail while I was gone. "Rush, I got a different spin to the so-called NSA leak. The NSA only handles the budgets for other alphabet agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, or the DEA." Does anybody remember the name Christopher Boyce, by the way? You remember the name Christopher Boyce? I'll tell you about Chris Boyce. Christopher Boyce compromised the Rhyolite satellite to the communists in the seventies. In other words, he told the communists, he was an American who told the commies about the Rhyolite satellite.
 It was the start of the end of the Cold War. This is what the movie, The Falcon and the Snowman was about, Christopher Boyce. He was a turncoat. He gave up information about the spy to the Soviets. That was the beginning of the end because the Russian leaders decided that since the United States could intercept their communications, they didn't have a chance against us. That was the first thing that turned on their light, and then you go on and on through the Reagan administration and get to SDI and that was the final straw. They learned they couldn't compete. So this e-mail, "Now that the terrorists know what our capabilities are, they're going to have a better understanding of their chances against us." That is, unless the Democrats are able to shut down the program. That is, unless the Democrats are able to continue to side with our enemies, the Democrats are able to continue to penalize the good guys here, and the media, then the terrorists are going to win, but if we can prevail on this, then fine. |
|
|
Wiretaps are not even necessary because these intercepts are done by electronics, computer data mining. They're not even really real wiretaps. As the e-mailer says, "The point that I'm trying to make here is that the spy system's been around for a long time, and the people who were able to win popularity contests and get themselves elected have been briefed on a need-to-know basis. The Democrats are Bush-bashing because he's decided most of them don't have a need to know, and they can't be trusted to know. And this whole NSA flap is because they know he's right, and they're mad over their loss of power and control." That's a theory, and I think that's an element of it, but I think there's far more. I think they're just so obsessed with getting their own power back and taking Bush out that they don't care on the temporary basis who they end up siding with. Let's go to the audiotapes. James Risen of the New York Times was on the Today Show today, an exclusive interview. His story was held to be tied to a book release, and this is so predictable what he says. Katie Couric's question: "I know that you broke the story, as we mentioned, for the New York Times. Why do you think the people who talked about this secret program came forward and told you about it?"
RISEN: I think this was the most classic whistleblower case I've ever seen where people --
RUSH: Stop the tape! Stop the tape. That's the new spin. These are not leakers, why, these are whistle-blowers, why, I think he'll even call them patriots.
RISEN: You know, in a lot of stories, people have mixed motives for why they talk to reporters. Some people in some stories, there's a turf battle, and they are losing out in a turf battle or whatever. In this case, I've been a reporter for about 25 years. This was the purest case of a whistle -- of whistleblowers coming forward. People who truly believed that there was something wrong going on in the government and they were motivated I believe by the purest reasons.
RUSH: All right, let's take a look at this. I think this displays for us the dramatic differences that exist between us and them. Here's Risen, and his leakers are whistle-blowers, and they're patriotic, only doing this for the purest of reasons. Well, could you not say the same thing about whoever it was that leaked Valerie Plame's situation. In fact, the purpose of leaking Valerie Plame's name, whoever did it, was not to expose her and her covert status -- and you know how we know that? Because the special prosecutor didn't even find that to be a crime! Scooter Libby's been indicted on what's called a process crime, lying to the grand jury. But there's no charge that anybody leaked the identity of a covert agent. The leakers, whoever they were, whoever he or she is, in the Plame case, they had just as pure a motive. They were trying to protect the government's policy and the war in Iraq. They were leaking these bits of information here to try to discredit a bogus story that was being told by Joe Wilson and his wife. You know, let's talk about whose motives are pure. Well, to the left, the purest of motives are defined by a whistleblower who seeks to undermine the administration. Scooter Libby, on the other hand, to these people is an absolute hardened criminal. He is nothing. He is dirt. He is scum. He had the audacity to leak this precious operative's name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Risen then continues here with the next question. Katie says, "Well, as you know, your revelations have caused the CIA to launch a formal investigation -- not -- well, DOJ is actually doing it, or the justice department," she says, "to launch a formal investigation. Are you concerned that you're going to have to reveal your sources to a grand jury?"
RISEN: Well, I hope not. I think that at this point it would -- these people came forward for the best reasons. This is in my opinion the complete opposite of the Plame case. These are people who came forward in order to tell the American people the truth as they saw it, and I think they were truly American patriots.
RUSH: Well, we're going to find out just how committed to the confidentiality of his sources Risen is and whether he'll be willing to go to jail to protect them, because that standard's already been set. We've got an independent counsel who has sent reporters to jail for not divulging their sources, and what does he say? Well, these are people that came forward in order to tell the American people the truth as they saw it. Who are they? It's not good enough to say that they're just government sources. Yeah, and since when does the reporter get to determine who's patriotic and who isn't? He's the arbiter of whether this is a patriotic leak or a political leak. He's the arbiter of this? He gets to sit there and decide?  We'll find out once this investigation gets going, if he gets to decide this. But no, make no mistake about something here: Who are these people? It's not enough anymore for a reporter to say, "These are people high, high caliber, very sensitive parts of..." Yeah, are they members of MoveOn.org? Are they Democrats? Do they contribute to the Democrat National Committee? Who are these people? Are they in the Senate? Where are these people? Let's find out who they are before we start passing judgment on their motives. And we certainly can't sit around and let the reporter be the arbiter of their motives. Here's the next question. "Let's talk about some of the content in your book. You have some very interesting revelations, a lot of different ones. One is that the president expressed concern that an Al-Qaeda member who was in custody received pain medications. He said, 'Who authorized that?' You suggested this might be the precursor to torture being used. Isn't that kind of a big leap?"
RISEN: They were discussing Abu Zubaydah, who was the first major Al-Qaeda figure to be captured. He had been wounded during the capture, and he was receiving medication. What I was told was that the president asked Tenet who authorized giving him pain medication. The question really goes to, how did the message get sent to the CIA over a period of several months that we have to get tough with prisoners? Because eventually we saw a whole -- the creation of a whole regime of harsh interrogation tactics that began at the CIA and then, as we saw, ended up at Abu Ghraib in Iraq with the military. And so there's a question of what were the origins of the interrogation techniques that were used in the war on terror? |
|
|
RUSH: You talk about a leap. Katie didn't even get halfway near it. So the president apparently -- and we only have Risen's version of this. We only have him as our source and whoever it is that is his source. So the president says to Tenet, well, who's given this terrorist pain medication? And that launches torture. That signaled to Tenet, okay, if the president wants us to be tough on these guys take the pain medication away and stack them up in a pyramid and send Lynndie England over there with a cigarette and a whip. This is how this happens, and this is what everybody here has glommed onto.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more Risen bit. You see the pattern here. This is something, by the way, that I have mentioned throughout this whole scandal, and see if this doesn't remind you of something that you've heard me talking about recently. Question from Katie Couric: "Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, George Tenet did not come across very well in your book."
RISEN: From 9/11 through the beginning of the war in Iraq, I think what happened was we -- the checks and balances that normally keep American foreign policy and national security policy towards the center kind of broke down --
RUSH: Stop the tape! Stop! What checks and balances keep American foreign policy and national security policy towards the center? What in the hell is he talking about? What right does he have to define the center anyway? I mean I know what he's talking about, don't misunderstand. Sounds like it's exactly, exactly right Snerdley, this sounds exactly like it's come out of the state department. They consider themselves centrists, they are higher and mightier than anybody, smarter and elite, and they're above it all, and of course here come these guys, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet and they sort of hijacked things. Who does that remind you of? This guy that used to be Colin Powell's chief of staff. I can't remember his name now, (Lawrence Wilkerson), Colin Powell's chief of staff who starts making these speeches in the middle of last month. Here's the rest of the bite.
RISEN: Of more of a radicalization of American foreign policy in which the career professionals were not really given a chance to kind of forge a consensus within the administration.
RUSH: Stop the tape. I know at least for this I know his sources are right out of the state department, it is totally clear what's happened here. What is it, forge a consensus? Forging a consensus helped us do what in defeating the Soviets in the Cold War, hmm? What credit can the state department claim to that? What credit can the state department claim to any success we've had in the war on terror, in Afghanistan, Baghdad, you name it. What success? Forging consensus? You know what consensus is? It's absence of leadership. When the state department talks about consensus it's making sure that nobody's neck's hanging out to dry if something goes wrong, which means we're not going to do anything decisive. We're just going to have the status quo, we'll have our ongoing dialogue, and we'll have our ongoing talks and communications, but we won't actually take steps to solve anything, because if we do that, we're out of business. There's no more reason for us to forge consensus. Here's the rest of this stupid bite.
RISEN: You had the principals, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Tenet and Rice, many others who are meeting constantly, setting policy, and really never allowed the people who understand, the experts who understand the region to have much of a say.
COURIC: You suggest there's a lot of power grabbing going on.
RISEN: Yes.
RUSH: This is absurd. They won the election! Cheney is the vice president of the United States; Bush is the president of the United States. Rumsfeld is the secretary of defense. They're a part of the administration, the executive branch. They won the election! They cannot "power-grab." There is no separation of powers between the executive branch and the state department. There's no constitutional authority here granting the state department any independence whatsoever. None. This is absurd, to have it portrayed now that the elected leaders of the nation were meeting constantly and setting policy as though that's sinister! Why, that's never happened before. The elected leaders, meeting constantly, setting policy, never allowing the people who understand the experts who understand the region? Now, that's a little ditty, isn't it? The experts are the people in the state department, the elected officials!
"What the hell they're doing? They're just a bunch of power mad little despots," and the truth of the matter is that the people that the country elected, Bush, and that he appointed, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, understand full well the danger posed to our security by the kind of mind-set that exists in the state department, the so-called experts over there are experts in nothing. They are certainly not experts in victory. They are not experts in success. They are experts in the status quo. They live and breathe on this notion that they alone understand the region. If it were up to the state department and James Risen and whoever his sources are, there would not be a democracy in Afghanistan today; there would not be a democracy in Iraq; there would not have been 11 million people turn out to vote. Those are the people who say that's not possible. Those are the people who say, "You don't understand the region." Those are the people that say, "You don't understand the Arab world. You go try to do something like that, you're going to have big troubles on your hands!" They don't understand diddly-squat.
It's been the case for decades, and finally we had some people elected who understand the problems posed by this kind of mind-set at the state department. Now all of a sudden those people -- it's crystal clear to me what's gone on here, and it's been crystal clear for two months. The established foreign policy establishment, if you will, in the state department and whoever is a member of it at justice and at the defense department, the Pentagon, have all aligned themselves, because they know full well that they are being outflanked, they're being outperformed, and they're having 30 or 40 years of their work blown up right in front of them. It is being demonstrated how inconsequential they are and have been. It is being demonstrated how ineffective and incompetent they are. It's been demonstrated what a bunch of phonies they have been. It's been demonstrated how they accomplish nothing if they are left alone to practice their art. And so it's simple human nature, protecting their own backyards and their little fiefdoms, and so they leak to these dummkopfs, these sponges at the New York Times who are, of course, fellow travelers and along the same lines, and of course you get this inertia going where Bush -- it all fits, the spying, overreaching, power grabbing. The fact is just the opposite, and these people are going to lose this big time because they're on the wrong side of history. Here, listen to the president, and contrast the president with what you just heard from this New York Times reporter.
THE PRESIDENT: The fact that somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States. There's an enemy out there. They read newspapers, they listen to what you write, they listen to what you put on the air, and they react. And we -- it seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with Al-Qaeda and/or an Al-Qaeda affiliate, and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why. They attacked us before; they will attack us again, if they can. And we're going to do everything we can to stop them.
RUSH: Now, the people that want to find fault with this are unfortunately placed for them, placed in the position of having to defend Al-Qaeda as a harmless organization. They're placed in the position of saying none of this is necessary, we have no fear, we have nothing to worry about. This attack on 9/11 occurred in this country! The idea that you cannot, as a government, to protect the citizens of this country, find out who else in this country might be talking to other Al-Qaeda types internationally is simply absurd. And yet that's the side the left and the Democrats have once again put themselves on. They have accepted the side of defeat. They are invested in it. Don't worry about that. I know it's maddening here, folks, but like Bush, he's confident this is going to work out, and so am I. I sleep well at night.
END TRANSCRIPT |
|
|
Read the Background Material... |
|
(NY Times: Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program)
Headline: The Plague of Success
Subhead: The Paradox of Ever-Increasing Expectations
Source: National Review
By: Victor Davis Hanson
Date: December 29, 2005
After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East.
After the anthrax scare, the arrests of dozens of terrorist cells, and a flurry of al Qaeda fatwas, most Americans thought another attack was imminent — and wanted their politicians to think the same. Today's sourpuss, Senator Harry Reid, once was smiling at a photo-op at the signing of the Patriot Act to record to his constituents that he was darn serious about terrorism. So we have forgotten that most of us after 9/11 would never have imagined that the United States would remain untouched for over four years after that awful cloud of ash settled over the crater at the World Trade Center.
Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.
Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.
Afghanistan in October, 2001, conjured up almost immediately warnings of quagmire, expanding Holy War at Ramadan, unreliable allies, a trigger-happy nuclear Pakistan on the border, American corpses to join British and Russian bones in the high desert — not a seven-week victory and a subsequent democracy in Kabul of all places.
Nothing in our era would have seemed more unlikely than democrats dethroning the Taliban and al Qaeda — hitherto missile-proof in their much ballyhooed cave complexes that maps in Newsweek assured us rivaled Norad's subterranean fortress. The prior, now-sanctified Clinton doctrine of standoff bombing ensured that there would be no American fatalities and almost nothing ever accomplished — the perfect strategy for the focus-group/straw-poll era of the 1990s.
Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly, since the bar has been astronomically raised since Tora Bora. After all, the Afghan parliament is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La Jolla, or Nantucket — or maybe not.
The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election — at a cost of some 2100 war dead — he would have been dismissed as unhinged.
But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic firebrands are now talking of impeachment.
What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?
One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins.
Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments — and has absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle.
Few Americans remember that nearly 750 Americans were killed in a single day in a training exercise for D-Day, or that during the bloody American retreat back from the Yalu River in late 1950 thousands of our frozen dead were sent back stacked in trucks like firewood. Our grandparents in the recent past endured things that would make the present ordeal in Iraq seem almost pedestrian — and did all that with the result that a free Germany could now release terrorists or prosperous South Korean youth could damn the United States between their video games.
Instead, we of the present think that we have reinvented the rules of war and peace anew. After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the three-week war to remove Saddam, we decreed from on high that there simply were to be no fatalities in the American way of war. If there were, someone was to be blamed, censured, or impeached — right now!
Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem — murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. We denigrate the Iraqis' trial of Saddam Hussein — as if the Milosevic legal circus or our own O.J. trial were models of jurisprudence. Still, who would have thought that poor Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a mass-murdering half-brother of Saddam Hussein, would complain that Iraqi television delayed lived feeds of his daily outbursts by whimpering, "If the sound is cut off once again, then I don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again. This is unjust and undemocratic."
A greater percentage of Iraqis participated in their elections after two years of consensual government than did Americans after nearly 230 years of practice. It is chic now to deprecate the Iraqi security forces, but they are doing a lot more to kill jihadists than the French or Germans who often either wire terrorists money, sell them weapons, or let them go. For what it's worth, I'd prefer to have one Jalal Talabani or Iyad Allawi on our side than ten Jacques Chiracs or Gerhard Schroeders.
Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and space — as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of high-definition television in Iraq — and who plotted to keep flat screens out of Baghdad.
The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon with Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah Omar. That someone — mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the most trying of circumstances — accomplished all that is either unknown or forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal.
Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more — and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
Headline: Laughable Caims About the NSA “Scandal”
Source: American Thinker
By: Clarice Feldman
Date: January 3rd, 2006
It’s clear that the New York Times is in big trouble with the announcement that the Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the leaks behind its NSA surveillance story. The investigation is long overdue.
The paper had been warned by the President that national security would be seriously jeopardized if this program were made public, but it nevertheless chose to print it anyway. And it timed the disclosure just as Congress was debating the extension of the Patriot Act, a law which, along with the NSA program, undoubtedly is responsible for the remarkable absence of attacks on US soil since 2001. There has been much debate on the legality of the program. All significant legal opinions in areas of new technology and unprecedented situations are debated. But keep in mind that the President sought legal opinions through normal channels, subjected the program to internal reviews and appropriately advised the Senate and House Intelligence Committee Majority and Minority members of it. Although Senator Rockefeller may have written a private note to himself expressing concerns, none of the members of Congress raised any serious objection to it or took a single step to stop it.
They undoubtedly understood at the time that the President acted out of real concern for the national welfare and in an area not adequately covered by existing law or procedure. And the Rasmussen poll shows that almost two-thirds of Americans agree with the President that the program was necessary, and the normal law enforcement model using warrants constitutes an archaic and impossible hurdle.
This is war, not law enforcement after all.
Professor Charles Fried clearly sets out why the technology being used makes the laws relating to traditional wiretapping and warrants obsolete.
I am convinced of the urgent necessity of such a surveillance program. I suppose but do not know—the revelations have been understandably and deliberately vague—that included in what is done is a constant computerized scan of all international electronic communications. (The picture of a G-Man in the basement of an apartment house tapping into a circuit board is certainly inapposite.)
Programmed into this computerized scan are likely to be automatic prompts that are triggered by messages containing certain keywords, go to certain addresses, occur in certain patterns or after specific events. Supposedly those messages that trigger these prompts are targeted for further scrutiny.
In the context of the post-9/11 threat, which includes sleeper cells and sleeper operatives in the United States, no other form of surveillance is likely to be feasible and effective. But this kind of surveillance may not fit into the forms for court orders because their function is to identify targets, not to conduct surveillance of targets already identified. Even retroactive authorization may be too cumbersome and in any event would not reach the initial broad scan that narrows the universe for further scrutiny.
Moreover, it is likely that at the first, broadest stages of the scan no human being is involved—only computers. Finally, it is also possible that the disclosure of any details about the search and scan strategies and the algorithms used to sift through them would immediately allow countermeasures by our enemies to evade or defeat them.
If such impersonal surveillance on the orders of the president for genuine national security purposes without court or other explicit authorization does violate some constitutional norm, then we are faced with a genuine dilemma and not an occasion for finger-pointing and political posturing.
But if we had paid attention and didn’t share the media’s amnesia, we already knew that. In 2002 both the New York Times and Newsweek reported that cumbersome legalities related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prevented crucial dots from being connected, which could have stopped the 9/11 plot. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth’s criticisms and investigation of the FBI official charged under FISA with preparing FISA warrant requests had essentially shut down the process in the critical pre 9/11 period. This, in fact, was the reason why the agency had not sought a warrant to view the contents of Moussaoui’s computer, a search which as we now know might have prevented 9/11. Indeed, the Joint Senate and House Intelligence Committee report detailed just that.
The FBI’s failure to obtain a warrant to search Zacharias Moussaoui’s computer spawned its own whistleblower (and Time Magazine co-Person of the Year), Minneapolis FBI agent Coleen Rowley. Rowley became the darling of the media and the left for essentially accusing the President of failing to ignore the very legalities which are now trumpeted as being outrageously violated by him. Once again, the left and its media allies demonstrate their “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” stance toward George W. Bush. It is hypocrisy of a high order.
But the New York Times’ hypocritical arrogance in printing the NSA story was matched by its doomed effort in the Plame case to argue there was a First Amendment right to refuse to respond to the subpoena issued by the Special Prosecutor. A Special Prosecutor whose appointment it had demanded to investigate the non-outing of a non-covert agent, a matter with absolutely no national security implications; a matter which was, in fact, not criminal at all.
They lost that case as we know. And they will lose on that very precedent any effort to refuse to reveal their sources in this matter of the NSA secrets. I expect their sources, who face criminal prosecution, will not waive any promise of confidentiality, and the New York Times reporters will talk or go to jail. Because executive editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger may well have been involved in the story and know the identity of the sources, and have refused to answer questions from their own ombudsmen, public editor Byron Calame, they too could be subpoenaed and compelled to testify or else endure jail time.
Were the matter less serious, I’d be laughing at the sheer fecklessness of the paper.
Nevetheless, the paper does have its defenders who are already in demand as talking heads. And I am laughing at their efforts. Their first line of defense is at least as absurd as the paper’s strategic missteps. As I understand their main contentions they are (a) these were not leakers, but “whistleblowers”, and (b) the case shows again the need for a federal law protecting journalists’ privilege. Both these argument are preposterous.
5 U.S.C. 1213 sets up the procedures by which federal whistleblowers are to proceed.
Complaints are to be filed with the Office of Special Counsel. If they are found to be of merit and they involve “foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information” and disclosure of information described in the complaint is “prohibited by law or by Executive order, the Special Counsel shall transmit such information to the National Security Advisor, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives, and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate.”
These are the very people, as it happens, that the President did fully inform of the program. There is simply no provision in the Act for calling New York Times reporters in lieu of the Office of Special Counsel.
That doesn’t mean we will be spared this ridiculous claim. But it does mean that it is an idiotic argument. If it weren’t, every intelligence officer could, by that means, decide our national security policy and its legality. Better they should spend their time doing their actual jobs, at which they haven’t actually been meriting much praise of late. Only slightly more risible is the claim that this case establishes yet again the need for a federal law granting journalists testimonial privileges. And yet that argument is being forwarded with a straight face:
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, expressed outrage at the Justice Department investigation into who leaked classified information to The New York Times about the Bush administration’s controversial domestic spying program, saying it is even more serious than the Valerie Plame probe.
“This is much more of a classic whistleblower than the Plame case was and that is why the stakes are much higher,” Dalglish said. “The public needed to know about it and that is a classic reason why reporters need to protect their sources and it is even more reason why there is a need to have a federal shield law.”
Dalglish believes that the seriousness of this case could drive regular citizens to speak out against such investigations and push more for a federal source protection bill to be passed by Congress. “Hopefully the public will begin to understand,” she said.
I have no idea in what precinct of Planet Zongo the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is located, but Ms. Dalglish, this is the worst possible case for protecting sources. Those sources, dear lady, just violated federal laws designed to protect national security in the middle of a war started on our own soil. And the reporters who abetted that disgusting act are not worthy of our sympathy.
I can think of no reason why they sat on the story for a year, except commercial and partisan considerations. The Left is claiming the Times should have published the story in time to sway the election against Bush. But public editor Calame notes conflicting statements from the Times about the story’s readiness for publication a year ago. No doubt criminal legal counsel employed by the Times is already worrying about getting the story straight.
I seriously doubt the Reporters Committee or the Times will get much support – except from the very people who argued that no matter how well-known it was that Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, anyone who repeated that fact violated the Agee Act; and that the matter was so important a Special Prosecutor had to be appointed and the matter fully and thoroughly investigated until the leakers were named. |
|
|
| *Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time. |
|
|
