Annika has had enough of the MSM’s anti-Bush scandal campaign:

i Give Up
Now there’s a problem with warrantless radiation monitoring? How could anybody possibly object to that?

i give up. i really give up.

Why don’t we just propose a new law next year to quiet all the critics? The Unconditional Surrender Act of 2006.

Jack Kelly quotes the Anchoress, who describes a recent conversation with a neighbor at the supermarket on democrat partisanship and MSM coverage of the NSA Flap. The Democrats and the press seem to have lost all seriousness and all credibility regarding national security, ” says the Anchoress , to which her neighbor (a democrat) responds:

“Oh, you said a mouthful, kid! I’m so disgusted with my party I’m thinking of sittin’ out the next election, because these people have lost any sense of what their jobs are; they seem to think they were put into office to destroy Bush, and that is all that motivates them – it’s all they can think about, and they seem to think this is what they were charged with, when we put them in office. Hello? I didn’t freaking vote for Schumer to shove his face into every camera, promote himself and play obstruction games when we have a war to fight. I did not vote for Hillary so she could sit around waiting for opinion polls to tell her what to do before she runs for president, and you know what, if she doesn’t mean to be a senator then she shouldn’t be running for the seat in ‘06! Let her step aside, and be honest for once, and start her freakin’ presidential campaign, already, and let a serious legislator run for her seat – her office is rude and unresponsive, anyway – she’s useless! At least you call Schumer’s office, they are respectful – if you look for help, they actually respond, even if they don’t do anything, they send a freakin’ letter letting you know they know you’re alive and they need your vote again. Hillary’s office? They can’t be bothered with anyone! And don’t get me started on this Patriot Act nonsense! When I saw Reid saying they killed it I flipped out! I FREAKIN’ FLIPPED OUT! FOUR YEARS and we haven’t been attacked – what are Reid or Schumer or Hillary gonna say if they let the Patriot Act die and six months from now we’re attacked? They’re gonna blame Bush? Of course, they are, but they’re gonna have a hell of a time convincing the country that Bush is responsible for an attack when THEY were the ones who dropped the Patriot Act! And this FISA baloney is just that: BALONEY! I want to know whose (sic) leaking this crap! We had a big investigation on that stupid Valerie Plame deal, and who was she – she’s a nobody at a desk at Langley – we have two freakin’ years of investigations on that stupid issue, and it’s all probably Tim Russert’s doing, anyway – end it, already – let’s investigate who’s freaking LEAKING real national secrets! Whose leaking the CIA work? Whose leaking the surveillance? That’s what we need to know! THAT’S what we should be investigating, and if we find out who did it, we arrest the scum and throw him in jail, I don’t care who he is! I read that Jonathan Alter piece and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to puke my guts up! You know why? Because I remember something that maybe Alter has forgotten, that when 9/11 happened, Bush said he’d use ‘every tool’ at his disposal, and we all applauded that! Remember? We all said, THANK FREAKIN’ GOD this man is in charge, and he clearly means this! I haven’t forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten what downtown NYC smelled like for weeks after the attack. I haven’t forgotten the big freakin’ hole in the city. I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to look at a plane taking off from the airport, and me worrying that it was going to be blown up before my eyes from some freakin’ crazed assh*le with a bomb in his shoe, or someone on the ground with a surface-to-air missile – I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN – and I’m getting damned fed up with my party leadership that seems to have forgotten, and I’ll tell you what, they had better start REMEMBERING, real soon, or they’re gonna find their asses tossed OUT, come November if they don’t get with the program! And don’t even get me started with the papers, I cancelled the freakin’ papers – I’m fed up with all of them! What do I need the papers for, so I can read how everything bad that happens in the whole world is Bush’s fault? I can predict what they’re gonna write! Now, I want news, I go look at the internet, I turn on C-span and watch things for myself! I’m an educated woman, and I can think for myself, I don’t need newspapers if they’re not gonna gimmee news!”

Impeachment talk started on the left not long before Xmas: example, example2.

Responding, the New York Post today proposed another discussion meme: Treason.

Thomas Bray points out that America-style civil liberties are unheard of even in some prominent democracies:

Spying on e-mail and cell phone traffic without a warrant. Searching offices and residences without a court order. Locking citizens away for weeks or months without filing charges.

Sound like your worst nightmare about the supposedly lawless Bush administration? Perhaps. But I refer to restrictions on civil liberties that are taking place not in the United States but, in the order in which I cited them, Canada, France and Great Britain.

All three countries are cited as moral superiors to the rogue regime in Washington, where the fascist leaders George Bush and Dick Cheney are said to be intent on fastening a reign of terror on the United States. But a brief scan of newspaper websites in those countries — something that the American mainstream media could easily have done before unleashing its own reign of terror on unsuspecting readers — reveals that their governments have in many cases gone far beyond where the Bush-Cheney could ever dream of going.

What if they gave a scandal and nobody came? asks one of Roger L. Simon’s commenters.

Posted by: chuck at December 24, 2005 05:07 PM

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The New York Times’ James Bamford cheerfully tells us all about “the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word – which itself is secret,” and in the omniscient manner of journalists everywhere proceeds to evaluate the ultra-secret NSA’s current operations as “struggling to adjust to the war on terror.”

Jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency,” the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward.

Bamford naturally understands NSA’s mission better than its own leadership, or that of the elected administration. And he understands better too the limitations of data mining:

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country… “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands.”

Ignoring these insurmountable obstacles, Bamford scolds, the Bush Administration heedlessly proceeded to engage in automated data-mining, which he refers to as “eavesdropping.” Impersonal and automated monitoring of international communications searching for keywords, he thinks, should be out-of-bounds. US intelligence and defense agencies should be forced to investigate only on an individual basis, filling out the proper pile of paper work, and going to court, presenting a case, and obtaining an individual warrant. Such practices push the boundaries of the law, and might lead to tyranny.

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The Washington Post’s Susan Spaulding editorializes indignantly that the Bush Administration went right ahead, and covertly conducted an impersonal and automated search for potential terrorist communications in such secrecy “that Congress was [only] briefed ‘at least a dozen times’ in the four years since the wiretap program started.”

Presumably, the president should have funded an international advertising campaign to notify everyone what he was plannng to do, then conducted a full-scale national political debate before proceeding with a secret intelligence operation in time of war:

Even assuming that these classified briefings accurately conveyed all relevant facts, it appears that they were limited to only eight of the 535 senators and representatives, under a process that effectively eliminates the possibility of any careful oversight.

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In U.S. News & World Report, David E. Kaplan shrieks:

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree.

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The more sensible Mickey Kaus notes ruefully:

Another spy scandal and Bush will be at 60%.

While the Wall Street Journal quotes St. Paul on standing fast in liberty, the New York Times is publishing ersatz further revelations from the Pouting Spook Community attempting to build a case that the Bush Administation has been guilty of illegally defending the United States from legitimate forms of dissent, such as detonating nuclear devices in major cities like New York.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

I find it very simple to refute the left’s nonsensical theories of sinister Executive Branch plots to violate the Constitution and stifle dissent. If the government were actually doing what it could, and should, be doing lawfully in time of war, none of these kinds of stories would be being published at all, since all domestic subversives (including the leaking doves and their jounalistic collaborators) would have long since been interned for the duration of the war to some inclement locality, an hour or so south of Barstow, California, where from behind barbed wire, they could devote their attention to herpetological studies and counting Joshua trees, instead of providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.

Granddaddy Long Legs (a relatively new blog devoted to MSM debunking) goes to work on backgrounding the NSA Flap story, fisking its propositions, and identifying the key mechanism of these kind of anti-Bush Administration news cycles:

The MSM reports stories about Democrats (who) opine and sensationalize about Republicans.

Writing in the Washington Post, Posner argues that innocent parties’ privacy is not really generally being invaded by data-mining to find terrorist communications:

The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.

Max Boot writing in the LA Times notes the left’s hypocritical double standard on leaking. Robert Novak’s mention of Valerie Plame’s employment has been treated in every MSM outlet, and throughout the leftwing Blogosphere, as the gravest intelligence-related crime in US history since Benedict Arnold tried selling West Point to the British. On the other hand, an endless succession of intelligence leaks far more damaging to US interests, emanating from the anti-Bush administration conspiracy of pouting spooks not only never receives the slightest criticism, but instead, in each and every case, the revelation is promoted as a government scandal revealed by crusading journalists, assisted by righteously distressed officials, whose identities must be kept secret.

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook. For daring to reveal a CIA operative’s name — in wartime, no less! — they wanted someone frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, preferably headed for the gallows.

Since then there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of “renditions” to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Va. We don’t know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

“More Iraqis think things are going well in Iraq than Americans do. I guess they don’t get the New York Times over there.”—Jay Leno

The Pouting Spooks unleashed today their latest salvo against the Bush Administration. This intelligence leak concerned the National Security Agency, was released via the NY Times, and featured a civil liberties scare story. The leak was carefully timed to compete for attention with headlines of the election in Iraq, and to assist Senate opponents in preventing a vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Times informed its readers breathlessly that:

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.

And then went on to source the story:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Oh sure, they’re so anonymous. The pouting spooks behind this leak, and all the others, are a collection of Intelligence community and State Department doves, operating above-ground as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, which ought to be Vipers), mentioned here previously:

Ray McGovern, in a 2004 interview with the leftwing journal Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Earlier Posts

NY Times promises of anonymity have already been demonstrated to be valueless in the face of criminal investigations, specifically as the result of the efforts of the same pouting spooks to criminalize policy differences. It seems inevitable that sooner or later the Administration is going to get tired of passively serving as a punching bag for an endless series orchestrated media attacks, and will decide what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, and begin prosecuting obvious breaches of federal law. The federal prison system is large enough to accomodate 35+ Vipers.

All who subscribe to the position taken in this “story” are, in this blog’s opinion, too stupid to live.