Coming on the heels of Cheney’s FOX News Sunday interview, in which the former Vice President leveled criticism toward the current President that he is increasing America’s vulnerability to terrorism, is an interview by Jake Tapper with the president’s National Security Adviser, Gen. Jim Jones (Ret.). Jones claims that under the Obama Administration, we have been more successful in putting terrorists out of business and in improving international relations:

“This type of radical fundamentalism or terrorism is a threat not only to the United States but to the global community,” Jones said. “The world is coming together on this matter now that President Obama has taken the leadership on it and is approaching it in a slightly different way – actually a radically different way – to discuss things with other rulers to enhance the working relationships with law enforcement agencies – both national and international.”

Jones said that “we are seeing results that indicate more captures, more deaths of radical leaders and a kind of a global coming-together by the fact that this is a threat to not only the United States but to the world at-large and the world is moving toward doing something about it.”

The former Marine General didn’t provide any specific numbers to back up his claim, but he said “there is an increasing trend and I think we seen that in different parts of the world over the last few months for sure.” He added that he was not “making a tally sheet saying we are killing more people, capturing more people than they did — that is not the issue.”

But the numbers are going up, he said. “The numbers of high value targets that we are successfully reaching out to or identifying through good intelligence” from both the CIA and intelligence agencies from US allies has made the difference, he said. “We have better human intelligence; we know where the terrorists are moving. Because of the dialogue and the tone of the dialogue between us and our friends and allies…the trend line against terrorism is positive, and that’s what we want. If we have a positive trend line we have a safer country.”

All this was going on under the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration is an inheritor of those successes, including cooperation amongst foreign nations in the GWoRIT.

Many of the tools and policies put in place in waging the Overseas Contingency Operations are Bush era creations, which President Obama has kept in place in his continuation of “Bush’s War(s)”.

Steve Schippert writes:

Someone is going to point to Pakistan to help him out here, where Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was finally introduced to the working end of a Hellfire missile.

That’s a load of garbage the instant anyone attempts to take that easy way out. The cooperation within Pakistan has got jack to do with President Obama’s suddenly deft foreign policy prowess nor his wild popularity with global media and resulting coverage – which is to be astutely distinguished from wild popularity among world leaders. Pakistan’s cooperation was being lined up mostly by the Taliban itself, which made its insurgency against the government of Pakistan so bold that the Pakistanis could push it off no longer. They simply had to deal, and have been for the better part of the year.

Predator drone attacks? Those began under President Bush and continue on under President Obama. Under Musharraf and during the Bush tenure, Pakistani authorities handed over to us, Abu Zubaydah and KSM. How have relations improved under Obama’s watch?

The GWoRIT has not been waged ONLY militarily and ONLY in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s been waged globally, with kills and captures of leaders and operatives happening all the time, in 102 different countries, in cooperation with our CIA and FBI and our military. This all happened under President Bush.

Cowboy diplomacy and “go-it-alone” unilateralism? “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists”? America’s standing harmed; we’re hated all over the world….spin and the stuff of talking point mantra myth-perceptions.

“There is no military solution.”

So sick of this strawman! When had the Bush Administration ever claimed its solution to fighting terrorism was strictly a military one? When was its approach to Iraq and Afghanistan ever strictly a military solution?!

Reaching out to the Muslim community? Not exclusively unique to President Obama.

Closing Gitmo? Really?!? Please wake me when it actually happens.

The War in Iraq? President Obama rode in on the coattails of the surge success he opposed and is merely surfing the waves of SOFA, signed under President Bush.

The War in Afghanistan? He’s acting more like Bush, than not.

NSA warrantless wiretaps much criticized under Bush continue under Obama (partial list of plots averted under Bush)….Rendition programs begun under Clinton, leaked under Bush (which did harm our relations by embarrassing allies implicated in cooperation with the Bush Administration on the GWoRIT- but that’s thanks to the NYTimes, USAToday, and WaPo. We just can’t be trusted with keeping secrets), continue under Obama….

On June 23, 2009, Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta learned of a highly compartmentalized program to assassinate al Qaeda operatives that was launched by the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When Panetta found out that the covert program had not been disclosed to Congress, he canceled it and then called an emergency meeting June 24 to brief congressional oversight committees on the program. Over the past week, many details of the program have been leaked to the press and the issue has received extensive media coverage.

That a program existed to assassinate al Qaeda leaders should certainly come as no surprise to anyone. It has been well-publicized that the Clinton administration had launched military operations and attempted to use covert programs to strike the al Qaeda leadership in the wake of the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. In fact, the Clinton administration has come under strong criticism for not doing more to decapitate al Qaeda prior to 2001. Furthermore, since 2002, the CIA has conducted scores of strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the MQ-1 Predator and the larger MQ-9 Reaper.

These strikes have dramatically increased over the past two years and the pace did not slacken when the Obama administration came to power in January. So far in 2009 there have been more than two dozen UAV strikes in Pakistan alone. In November 2002, the CIA also employed a UAV to kill Abu Ali al-Harithi, a senior al Qaeda leader suspected of planning the October 2000 attack against the USS Cole. The U.S. government has also attacked al Qaeda leaders at other times and in other places, such as the May 1, 2008, attack against al Qaeda-linked figures in Somalia using an AC-130 gunship.

A program being set in place to kill the leadership of our enemy….and somehow, someway, this is shocking to people. Why in the world would we NOT have a program like this set up?

As early as Oct. 28, 2001, The Washington Post ran a story discussing the Clinton-era presidential finding authorizing operations to capture or kill al Qaeda targets. The Oct. 28 Washington Post story also provided details of a finding signed by President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks that reportedly provided authorization to strike a larger cross section of al Qaeda targets, including those who are not in the Afghan theater of operations. Such presidential findings are used to authorize covert actions, but in this case the finding would also provide permission to contravene Executive Order 12333, which prohibits assassinations.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush and the members of his administration were very clear that they sought to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the members of the al Qaeda organization. During the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in the United States, every major candidate, including Barack Obama, stated that they would seek to kill bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda. Indeed, on the campaign trail, Obama was quite vocal in his criticism of the Bush administration for not doing more to go after al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan. This means that, regardless of who is in the White House, it is U.S. policy to go after individual al Qaeda members as well as the al Qaeda organization.

But now a real lightweight scared little politician, in one Leon Panetta, has blown the whistle and caused it’s demise. And we fall farther back into the realm of September 10th, 2001. Just asking to be attacked.

Hell, even Time writer Robert Baer, a CIA veteran, is calling this controversy bulls&*t:

But like many of these stories, there’s less to it than meets the eye. The unit conducted no assassinations or grabs. A former CIA officer involved in the program told me that no targets were picked, no weapons issued and no one sent overseas to carry out anything. “It was little more than a PowerPoint presentation,” he said. “Why would we tell Congress?”

That’s a good question, especially since the program was an open secret. On Oct. 28, 2001, the Washington Post ran an article with the title “CIA Weighs ‘Targeted Killing’ Missions.” And in 2006, New York Times reporter James Risen wrote a book in which he revealed the program’s secret code name, Box Top . Moreover, it is well known that on Nov. 3, 2002, the CIA launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone over Yemen, killing an al-Qaeda member involved in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. And who knows how many “targeted killings” there have been in Afghanistan and Iraq?

~~~

So why all the fuss? Very likely because of that word assassination. I found out the weight of the term in Washington when I was still in the CIA. In the spring of 1995 I was in charge of a small unit in northern Iraq. It was a time when it appeared that with only a little push, Saddam Hussein would fall. There were plans for a military coup, which were quickly twisted into rumors of a plan to assassinate Saddam. The Clinton White House picked up the assassination part and called the CIA to check. My team and I were pulled back to Washington. The FBI investigated, decided no one had planned to assassinate anyone, and dropped the matter. Eventually the Department of Justice sent a letter to the CIA “declining” to prosecute us for attempted murder.

And now this may very well kill the CIA, and our security with it:

I think we’re going to find out that the CIA’s assassination program was dealing in pure hypotheticals, ones it intended to tell Congress about if they became real possibilities. (I won’t try to guess what Cheney would have done.) Yet however overblown the story, if a full-fledged investigation into it does occur, it could be the last nail in the CIA’s coffin. This Congress could succeed where the Church Committee failed. Even if things are not that dire — people are always talking about abolishing the CIA — it will undermine morale for years.

The mind boggles. Everyone, even the far left, whined that we had not assassinated Osama. When was it going to happen they asked. Why hadn’t Bush got it done they whined.

But now that a program existed, and which may have become operational sometime soon, it’s trashed….and the CIA with it.

Stratfor explains why this program was so compartmentalized:

Because of the physical risk to the officers involved in such operations, and the political blowback such operations can cause, it is not surprising that the details of such a program would be strictly compartmentalized inside the CIA and not widely disseminated beyond the gates of Langley. In fact, it is highly doubtful that the details of such a program were even widely known inside the CIA’s counterterrorism center (CTC) — though almost certainly some of the CTC staff suspected that such a covert program existed somewhere. The details regarding such a program were undoubtedly guarded carefully within the clandestine service, with the officer in charge most likely reporting directly to the deputy director of operations, who reports personally to the director of the CIA.

As trite as this old saying may sound, it is painfully true. In the counterterrorism realm, leaks destroy counterterrorism cases and often allow terrorist suspects to escape and kill again. There have been several leaks of “sources and methods” by congressional sources over the past decade that have disclosed details of sensitive U.S. government programs designed to do things such as intercept al Qaeda satellite phone signals and track al Qaeda financing. A classified appendix to the report of the 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on Intelligence Capabilities (which incidentally was leaked to the press) discussed several such leaks, noted the costs they impose on the American taxpayers and highlighted the damage they do to intelligence programs.

But as Baer said, it was a powerpoint presentation. They wanted it to move forward and it was moved up the chain of command, Panetta, and he kills it. Announcing to al-Qaeda that they no longer have to fear being killed.

The USA is once again a paper tiger.

Here’s a little ditty that is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for the rest of the day today.

Roll the tape:

Mrs. Pelosi insisted at a news conference that “We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” Mrs. Pelosi also claimed that the CIA “did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true.” She had earlier said on TV, “I can say flat-out, they never told us that these enhanced interrogations were being used.”

The Obama administration’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, and Mr. Goss have both disputed Mrs. Pelosi’s account.

In a report to Congress on May 5, Mr. Panetta described the CIA’s 2002 meeting with Mrs. Pelosi as “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.” Note the past tense — “had been employed.”

Mr. Goss says he and Mrs. Pelosi were told at the 2002 briefing about the use of the EITs and “on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission.” He is backed by CIA sources who say Mr. Goss and Mrs. Pelosi “questioned whether we were doing enough” to extract information.

We also know that Michael Sheehy, then Mrs. Pelosi’s top aide on the Intelligence Committee and later her national security adviser, not only attended the September 2002 meeting but was also briefed by the CIA on EITs on Feb. 5, 2003, and told about a videotape of Zubaydah being waterboarded. Mr. Sheehy was almost certain to have told Mrs. Pelosi. He has not commented publicly about the 2002 or the 2003 meetings.

So is the speaker of the House lying about what she knew and when? And, if so, what will Democrats do about it?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
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ht HotAir

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, backed Pelosi.

“I think it’s a tempest in a teapot really to say: Well, Speaker Pelosi should have known all of this, she should have stopped this, she should have done this or done that,” she said.

“I don’t want to make an apology for anybody, but in 2002, it wasn’t 2006, 07, 08 or 09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks.”

1) Dems KNEW (Hot Air has a great example of for/against/for/against dance done by political partisan posterboy Chuck Schumer)
2) Dems KNOW it worked
3) Dems have covered their complicity and ignorance regarding the war on terror since before 911, and have done so primarily by attacking Republicans and using them as scapegoats…all the while they were doing the exact same things, supporting the same measures behind closed doors, funding CIA prison programs in Intelligence Appropriations bills, and then pretending to be on some moral high ground.

They tried to distract from their own incompetence again by releasing the “torture memos” to shift discussion away from insane levels of spending with no results (even worse results). They miscalculated. They forgot that they have unchecked power, and thus unchecked accountability.

Now they’re trying to run away from the topic lest it get more press that they knew about “torture” and railed against it. Worse yet, if the press starts to look at who knew what/when…people might see that yeah, Democrats KNEW about pre-war intel on Iraq, and it wasn’t a case of Bushliedpeopledied (the timeline is 100% clear on this as are the bi-partisan investigations and reports). People might actually realize that Sen Rockefeller misled about a lack of WMD threat because he KNEW what was found. Sen Levin misled about regime ties to Al Queda because he’d been briefed too. All these briefings took place around the same time the torture briefings did. Dems want to back outta that research alley FAST.

The problem is…their base won’t let em.
WELCOME

First,
TRADITIONAL FORMS OF INTERROGATION WERE TRIED FIRST.
Part of the criteria put forth in determining who, when, how, and why Enhanced Interrogation Techniques would be used was the REQUIREMENT that traditional interrogation methods had to be tried first, and had to have failed. Only after that had been determined (according to the declassified documents, could the process for getting authorization to use EIJ’s be pursued. If you’re lazy, just look at the table of contents and you’ll see that this was not a case of, “Woo hoo! We got so-and-so! Get a bucket!”
tinyurl.com…
or
media.mcclatchydc.com…

Second,
IT WORKED; ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE WAS GAINED
from using EIJs.
7/15/04
www.politico.com…
(Gosh, looks like they got something from the interrogations/”torture” after all. )

Supposedly…
September 11, 2002: Ramzi bin al-Shibh captured, purportedly as a result of intelligence gained through “torturing” Abu Zubaydah.
www.washingtonpost.com…

Now, was it worth it? We don’t know because the Obama Admin (despite claiming that it wasn’t) refuses to release the documents from this date and others (as requested by VP Cheney, the Washington Post, and the New York Times) which allegedly show that yes…attacks were thwarted by the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.

What are Obama and the Democrats hiding?

“On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture. We never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.

The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful — wouldn’t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal. And any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong. Did it produce the desired results? I think it did. “- Dick Cheney, ABC News exclusive interview on Dec. 15, 2008

I was hoping one of the FA authors would blog about the Obama Administration’s declassification of 4 memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, from 2002 to 2005.

I haven’t had time to read up on these releases; and since no one else has made a post as of yet, I figured I’d put out an open thread before it becomes yesterday’s the other day’s news.

Was the Administration right in releasing these? For what purpose does it serve the public?

Did the “harsh interrogation techniques”, from what we know, constitute “torture”? And did they achieve any positive results in the way of actionable intelligence?

August 1, 2002
Memorandum for John Rizzo
Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency
Interrogation of al Qaida Operative

May 10.2005

Memorandum for John A. RIZZO
SENIOR DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Re: ApplicatiQnoJ18 u.S.C. §§ 23·(0-23404 iol!l1~f:eililttiqull’s
That May Be Used in the Interrogation of a High Value al Qaida Detainee

May 10,2005
Memorandum for JOHN A. RIZZO
SENIOR DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Re: Application of18 USc. §§ 2340-2340A to Use Certain Techniques
in the Interrogation of High Value al Qaeda Detainees

May 30, Z005
MEMORANDUM FOR JOHN A. RIZZO
SENIOR DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Re: Application of United States Obligations Under Article I6 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and to Certain Techniques that May Be Used in the Interrogation of High Value al Qaeda Detainees

Also of interest:
The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror
The point of interrogation is intelligence, not confession.
By MICHAEL HAYDEN and MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

Here is Stephanie Miller on Larry King Live:

LARRY KING, HOST: Nancy, what do you make of hoping for failure. Supposing it worked, and there were maybe some socialistic inclines, but more people went to work and more people had health care? Why would that be bad?

NANCY PFOTENHAUER, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Well, I think the point is that Rush — and I agree with him wholeheartedly on this — believes these policies are antithetical to the American dream, and absolutely the wrong direction for the economy. I would be delighted to challenge the other two panelists on this one. What he has put together in the so-called stimulus package is an embarrassment. You had Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid writing the bill. You’ve put in 46 billion for 15 programs that OMB already declared ineffective. You have 300 million dollars going for golf carts, for heavens sake. Then turns around and, in a downturn economy, and advocates a tax increase. At the same time, he is making protectionist noises. This is a nasty economic cocktail, and it is going to hurt the American people. And I think that’s what Rush Limbaugh has been trying to underscore. And he is exactly right.

KING: If he fails, Stephanie, that will be good?

STEPHANIE MILLER, LIBERAL TALK RADIO HOST: I guess that is what Nancy and her friends want. As long as you have a place to listen Rush on the radio — if he fails we all fail.

KING: If his policies fail, he fails, right?

MILLER: Exactly. To me that seems treasonous.

~~~

MILLER: Nancy, you are right about one thing. We love this episode of Republican. It’s delightful and it’s not solving any of the serious problems that the country is facing. You know who is it good for? Rush Limbaugh. He loves this attention.

If I could say something tonight that gets me that kind of attention, like maybe Rush Limbaugh should be executed for treason. How about that?

I’m sorry, Rush would be way at the back of any line waiting to get shot for treason. Wanting Obama to fail in turning this country into a Socialist state is one of the most patriotic sentiments I’ve heard on radio in some time. And if he had said the same thing, that those who want Obama’s plan to succeed should be shot for treason he would be strung up by Miller. Par for the course I suppose, inside any description of a liberal is the word hypocrite.

Maybe we should put those in the press, such as James Risen and Eric Lichtblau and who leaked the CIA wiretap program and the SWIFT program in the front of that line to get shot for treason?

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.

Civil-liberties groups were among those outraged that the White House sanctioned the use of harsh intelligence techniques — which some consider torture — by the Central Intelligence Agency, and expanded domestic spy powers. These groups are demanding quick action to reverse these policies.

Former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, leader of Obama’s intelligence-transition team. Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration. They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.

link

EXIT QUESTION: If you voted for Barack Obama in the hopes of a more transparent intelligence gathering administration, do you realize that you’ve just been pwnd?

How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command — every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war — to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
-President Bush in an address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington D.C., September 20, 2001.

While al Qaeda blusters and purports to be planning new attacks, they’ve been getting their asses kicked in, all across the globe. This is especially true in Iraq, where the Iraqi government will begin paying salaries to 51,000 members of the Sons of Iraq, and where al Qaeda lost the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

Critics of President Bush’s Iraq War venture love to claim that “he took his eye off the ball; we should be in Afghanistan and Pakistan- that’s where al Qaeda is.”; “We let bin Laden get away.” And of course, they also love to point out, “al Qaeda was never in Iraq….until we invaded.”

al Qaeda has had operations in 50 countries, and we’ve killed and captured operatives in 102 different countries since 9/11. Although we have a large, visible, military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve been engaging al Qaeda all across the globe.

Leaked to today’s NYTimes, which leaks it to the American public, is the following:

November 10, 2008
Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.

According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.

It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”

The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.

For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.

Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.

But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.

The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.

Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.

Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint Staff, declined to comment.

The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.

Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.

Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s proper role around the world, several administration officials said.

American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.

Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or approval.

Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before.

Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.

Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.

The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order — separate from the 2004 order — that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.

Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.

Of course, for the critics, this is simply further evidence of “cowboy diplomacy” by the power-usurping Bush regime.

It’s not by accident that we have not been attacked on American soil since September 11, 2001. It is because of President Bush engagement on the War on Terror that we have been kept safe for the last 7 years.

Will President Elect Obama carry the ball passed to him, without fumbling it? I think one of the legacies Bush will leave behind for the next president to be grateful for, are necessary tools set in place to fight terrorism in the 21st century (Patriot Act, NSA Surveillance programs, etc.).

President Bush never took his eyes off the ball. War-critics just never understood the rules of the game.

The entire article by Lance Fairchok at American Thinker is spot-on excellent, and exactly what I was looking for as an answer to this, which surprisingly seemed to get little media traction. However, I’d like to cite the following passage as a lead-in for a different, if not unrelated topic:

Webster defines propaganda as the “spreading of ideas or information to further or damage a cause,” it is also “ideas or allegations spread for such purpose.” The popular connotation of the word is false information, or information used to deceive or mislead. The left uses the word as a negative label for information that does not conform to their view, a tool to demean and discredit, regardless of truth. Their purpose is to dominate what the public sees with their messages and to eliminate contradictory information.

In information warfare, this is called shaping the battle space.

Throughout this war, the military has been inundated with negative press. Damaging leaks were rampant, coming from the Democrats in the Senate and the House, from the CIA and the State Department, even from inside the Pentagon. Every setback was exaggerated in an unrelenting information campaign to shape public perception.

Disinformation from our enemies was accepted without critical analysis by much of the media. Papers worldwide splashed every unsubstantiated negative story they could find. Enemy agents posing as stringers were feeding false stories about American atrocities. Terror attacks were timed for the 24-hour news-cycle. The broadcast media’s mantra for Iraq was “if it bleeds it leads” writ large.

The enemy knew it, and used it.

This relentless media assault frustrated and confounded the military, for whom the lessons of press malfeasance in Vietnam still rankle. How can you prosecute a war against a vicious enemy when your every action may be portrayed as criminal? How can you show success when failure is all Americans are allowed to see and hear? How do you get your message out when the press ignores or alters it? How can you tell the ground truth if no one is there to listen?

This brings us to today’s New York Times piece, written by Scott Shane, which details some of the little known interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. What is shocking (and yet, why shouldn’t we be surprised?) is the disclosure outing of the name of the 9/11 Mastermind’s interrogator:

Mr. Martinez declined to be interviewed; his role was described by colleagues. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request. (An editors’ note on this issue has been posted on The Times’s Web site at nytimes.com/world.)

What is it about today’s press that has impaired judgment, given aid and comfort to America’s enemies, endangered lives, prolonged the conflict, and sabotaged and undermined anti-terror programs by publishing leaks regarding such things as CIA secret prisons, NSA surveillance program, the SWIFT program? Were 32 frontpage stories on abu Ghraib published in the New York Times really warranted? Did the act itself inflame the Arab world and create more terrorists, or was it the media hype about the abuses, which did so? What about Haditha? Who has done more damage to the war effort? Soldiers on the frontlines to win hearts and minds, protesters out on the streets, politicians back in Washington, or perceptions created and driven by the media in its coverage of the war? The Bush Administration is held accountable for its failures in prosecuting the Iraq battle with zero percent casualties; but where is the media accountability?

There’s a reason for classified information and government secrets, aside from cynical conspiratorial beliefs that our government is up to no good, to remain secret from the public (and consequently, from our enemies). Is it not obvious?

From the editor’s note regarding the NYTimes defending its decision to publish KSM’s interrogator’s name:

The Central Intelligence Agency asked The New York Times not to publish the name of Deuce Martinez, an interrogator who questioned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other high-level Al Qaeda prisoners, saying that to identify Mr. Martinez would invade his privacy and put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency.

After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.

The Times’s policy is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely, most often in the case of victims of sexual assault or intelligence officers operating under cover.

[sarcasm]
Yes, if only he were an “undercover” operative like Valerie Plame Wilson. Then the NY Times would have kept him anonymous. [/sarcasm]

Since I opened this post by citing a passage from Michael Yon’s book I found relevant, let me bookend the post by closing with this passage from Robert Kaplan’s Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, pg 26-27:

Dekryger showed me the book he was reading, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle by Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod. He said that he found the book inspiring. Leafing through it, and reading it carefully at night in the hootch, I discovered that it was like other books popular among marines and soldiers, but which the contemporary media, aside from the military correspondents, were barely aware of. No potboiler, Tarawa was just an old-fashioned sort of book, very much in the tradition of great war reporting as defined by Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary, Bing West in The Village, and Harold Moore and Joe Galloway in We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. These books celebrated the sacrifice and heroism of American troops in World War II and Vietnam not because it had been the authors’ intention, but because it was true and happened to be all around them.

~~~

Sherrod, like other correspondents of the era, keeps using the words “we and “our” when referring to the American side, for although a journalist, he was a fellow American living among the troops. Back in Honolulu a week after the battle, he found the naïveté of the home front toward Tarawa “amazing”. The public saw the killing of so many troops in so few days as scandalous. There were rumblings in Congress about an intelligence failure, and vows that such a thing must not happen again. But as Sherrod argues, there was no easy way to win many wars (in fact, eight months later, the first day of fighting on Guam would claim nearly seven hundred marines dead, wounded, or missing). Thus, “to deprecate the Tawara victory was almost to defame the memory of the gallant men who lost their lives achieving it.” He concludes that on Tarawa, in 1943, “there was a more realistic approach to war than there was in the United States.”

Three officials told ABC News Miers urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes.

But they did anyways. 

As for myself, I could care less.  KSM and his buddy deserved nothing less then waterboarding, and I think that technique let them off the hook too easy to be frank.

But the left and the right is starting to pile on and they do make some valid points.  Like the timing of this news:

The news just happens to be perfectly timed as the Supreme Court hears a Gitmo case and, as the WaPo,
notes, on the same day “House and Senate negotiators reached an
agreement on legislation that would prohibit the use of waterboarding
and other harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA and bring intelligence
agencies in line with rules followed by the U.S. military.”

Oh no, the MSM would never hold on to this kinda news just to influence legislation would they? 

Hoekstra and Reyes are coming out swinging:

The CIA did not tell Congress about the destruction in 2005 of
videotapes recording aggressive CIA interrogations of two Al Qaeda suspects
until this year, the top two members of the House Intelligence Committee said in
an angry letter Friday to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden.

Anticipating an upcoming New York Times article revealing the destruction,
Hayden said in a memo to employees on Thursday that congressional oversight
committees had been notified about the existence of the tapes and plans to get
rid of them.

“Based upon available records and our best recollection, this simply is not
true,” said a joint letter from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre
Reyes (D-Texas) and the committee’s ranking member and former chairman, Rep.
Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.).

Oh come on.  They told Congress about the tapes existence and their plans to destroy them. No stink was raised, no investigations, no hoopla.  Jane Harmon has already gone on record stating she was told about them.

Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the senior Democrat
on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of
Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s
intention to ultimately destroy them.

“I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a
bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Harman said. While
key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes,
they were not notified two years later when the spy agency actually
carried out the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay
Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’
destruction in November 2006.

So you have the White House counsel and the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee telling the CIA it wasn’t a good idea to destroy the tapes.  But they did anyway and now you have the Democrats yelling and screaming with selective outrage, as Marty Lederman describes:

Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of
legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying
nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at
which point he expresses outrage and incredulity — but reveals nothing.

…Jane Harman also knew of the intention to destroy
the tapes, and she at least “urged” the CIA in writing not to do it.
(Where were her colleagues?) But when she found out the CIA had
destroyed the tapes, where was Harman’s press conference? Where were
the congressional hearings?

But now its outrageous.

Just like the Plame episode prior to the election the timing of this whole thing stinks.

But beside all that my question is why would they videotape the damn things anyways? 
Waterboard them, I don’t care.  Those scum deserved much worse.  But to
videotape it?

UPDATE

You just have to listen to John Gibson today….he was on fire: (18 minutes long)

Check out Kevin Drum crying for al-Qaeda:

So here’s what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had
brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally
tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking,
(b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d)
eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical
“confessions” under duress.

Idiots.

“WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

The official spokesman said it was done because they held no intelligence value, and if the tapes were to get out (which is more then likely seeing as how the CIA leaks like a sieve) it could jeopardize the agents lives.  You would think the left could understand that since they were aghast at the danger the Plame leak put her under.  But big shocker….they ain’t so worried about the CIA agents now:

These tapes were destroyed to protect the people who didn’t protect any sense of decency in interrogations.

There is no internal reason, except saving your own ass from prosecution. And keeping the tapes out of court. The decision on the lowest techniques was made at the highest levels. And now we will witness lowdown denials as to who high up ordered the tapes destroyed. “What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He is Michael Hayden. And he talks not just about the destruction of the tapes. But about the techniques used too. We do not torture is all you need to know. But this all tortures credibility in a week where it has previously been flayed and fileted.

There is no internal reason. But there may be an infernal reason. Because if there were tapes of waterboarding, all the waterboarding in the world shouldn’t keep torturers from burning in hell. We do not torture is all you need to know.

Poor fella, I think he broke a blood vessel pounding the keys during that post.

Of course after the official spokesman the NYT’s quotes anonymous sources as saying they were destroyed because of “possible legal jeopardy.”  Which is hogwash.  Waterboarding is not illegal, and the CIA viewed the tapes prior to destruction and saw nothing illegal.  Not that the left will believe them.  They take the IC’s word as
gospel when it jives with their worldview, ie the NIE, but when it
delves into areas they don’t agree with, well then the IC is full of
it.  Funny how that works huh?

Another compelling reason for the destruction of the tapes was the fact that after the leak of the “panties on the Iraqi’s head” photo’s caused such an uproar in the Muslim community the CIA was worried that pictures of interrogations, which I am sure is not pretty…and shouldn’t be, would be leaked and create further turmoil in the Muslim world:

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said the
videotaping was ordered as a way of assuring “quality control” at
remote sites following reports of unauthorized interrogation
techniques. He said the tapes, along with still photographs of
interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became
concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.

He said the worries about the impact a leak of the tapes might have in the Muslim world were real.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to
several tough physical tactics, including waterboarding, which involves
near-suffocation. But C.I.A. officers judged that the release of photos
or videos would nonetheless provoke a strong reaction.

And you know damn well another rogue agent ala Valerie Plame would leak the thing if they could get their hands on it.

Lastly, the left is upset that the tapes were supposedly asked for and they were lied to:

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of
the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission,
which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any
other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency
prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who
relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that
the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the
judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly
sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

It was unclear?  Meaning the judge didn’t ask for the specific tapes and that being the case why would a intelligence agency offer up information and intelligence it didn’t have to?  There are big security concerns when it comes to national intelligence and if anyone is that foolhardy to believe the CIA would just open up the cupboard and say “have at it!” they are quite naive.

But don’t hold you breath that the left will buy any of this, and neither should anyone care if they do.  They will see conspiracies and evil conglomerates around every corner so they should be ignored.

Here a few of the questions and answers to wet your appetite:

HH: Do you believe, as opposed to your staff, that the CIA was filtering its own intelligence, Mr. Feith?

DF: Yes, I think that there were people, there were people in the CIA who had a theory that the Baathist secularists would not cooperate with the religious extremists in al Qaeda. And because they had that theory, when they looked at information that was, that showed, or that suggested that there was cooperation, they were inclined not to believe that information. And so what they were doing is they were preparing reports about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship in the year 2002, that were either excluding altogether, or downplaying older intelligence reports that suggested that there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda.

[...]HH: Now there has been for some time speculation that there is a war against the war inside of the CIA. Is that fair?

DF: Well, we know now quite clearly from people who were in the CIA at the time, and who have since left, and have written books and articles, and given interviews, that there were a substantial number of people, including some analysts at very high levels, who were fundamentally at odds with the President’s policy. And that’s…I mean, that’s okay in principle, as long as they are doing professional work. The problem is that some of these people, I think very unprofessionally, were leaking stories, making allegations, one of the standard techniques is using former intelligence officials as a vehicle for leaking stories about what’s going on within the administration, and a lot of those stories that came out were very harmful, very false, and have had a lasting effect in hurting the President.

And the whole 30 minute interview here:

Sure, the author goes on and on about the fact that Hoekstra was upset over not being briefed about a intelligence program:

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

But Mr. Hoekstra, who was briefed on and supported the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department's tracking of international banking transactions, clearly was referring to programs that have not been publicly revealed.

But fails to mention this part in the letter about Steve Kappes, who was at the time of the letter being brought back into the CIA as Deputy Director under nominee Hayden:

“I understand that Mr. Kappes is a capable, well-qualified, and well-liked former Directorate of Operations (DO) case officer. I am heartened by the professional qualities he would bring to the job, but concerned by what could be the political problems that he could bring back to the agency. There has been much public and private speculation about the politicization of the Agency. I am convinced that this politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have long been convinced that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorized disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets. I have come to the belief that, despite his service to the DO, Mr. Kappes may have been a part of this group. I must take note when my Democratic colleagues – those who so vehemently denounced and now publicly attacked the strong choice of Porter Goss as Director – now publicly support Mr. Kappes’s return.” (.PDF of letter here)

Wh-wha-what! The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee believes the Deputy Director of the CIA was involved in the leaks of our classified national security secrets!

And the New York Times mentions that not once.

How about the fact that Hoekstra is convinced the Plame story is part of these schemes to undermine the Bush administration?

Any mention? Nope.

But Tom Meguire did find the Washington Post writing a story where they added “domestic” to the letter written by Hoekstra. Problem is that no where in his letter does he mention that the program he is complaining about is domestic:

In a sharply worded letter, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee has told President Bush that the administration is angering lawmakers, and possibly violating the law, by giving Congress too little information about domestic surveillance programs.

Isn’t that special? My how they jump to conclusions based on what they HOPE they will find don’t they?

The Washington Post does allude to the fact that the Hoekstra letter contained his disappointment over the Kappes appointment, but fails to mention WHY he was disappointed over Kappes. Another shocker huh?

Stephen Spruiell has some extensive analysis over the briefing part of the letter:

We should, I suppose, consider ourselves lucky that the NYT didn’t find out which programs Hoekstra was referring to and splash their details all over the front page. But I keep wondering: Are these the alleged “special access programs” that disgruntled ex-NSA employee Russ Tice told the Senate Armed Services Committee about last May; at around the same time that Hoekstra sent his letter? On May 12th, Congress Daily reported (via Nexis):

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. Russell Tice, who worked on what are known as "special access programs," has wanted to meet in a closed session with members of Congress and their staff since President Bush announced in December that he had secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a court order. In an interview late Thursday, Tice said the Senate Armed Services Committee finally asked him to meet next week in a secure facility on Capitol Hill.

Is it just a coincidence that Hoekstra wrote his letter to President Bush so soon after Tice started talking about these programs? And what are we to make of Tice himself, who was fired from the NSA after he repeatedly accused a co-worker of being a Chinese spy and was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation that found him to be paranoid?

Whatever the case may be, it’s of concern that one of the administration’s closest allies on intelligence-gathering is suddenly starting to rebel. Is this just about the firing of Porter Goss and the hiring of Stephen Kappes? Or is this in some way related to weird whistleblower Russ Tice? And if so, is there anything to the claim that the administration has improperly withheld information from the intelligence committees, given that the NSA directed Tice to the armed services committees instead?

My point is that perhaps the intel committee was not briefed because the NSA believed in good faith that it was a matter for the armed services committees. If the programs are the ones that Russ Tice testified about (and Hoekstra made several statements on FNS about “the whistleblower process” leading me to believe that they are), then we know that the NSA believed them to be a matter for the armed services committees. Hoekstra obviously disagreed, and perhaps his arguments were persuasive.

Interesting argument. If the NSA believed that the program did not need to be briefed to the House Intelligence Committee since it fell under the DoD umbrella, what’s the problem? Hoekstra obviously disagreed and when he stomped his feet enough Bush caved and briefed them.

Me thinks Spruiell is on to something here regarding Tice. The nutcase testifies about some secret programs to the Armes Services Committee and then all of a sudden Hoekstra writes the letter. He wanted to be in the loop obviously.

But the big story here is the fact that he acknowledges the CIA coup, and even pointedly referrers to the Plame affair as an example.

The New York Times and the Washington Post doesn’t see it that way I suppose. Hell, they don’t even mention it in passing.

Other’s Blogging:

• Right Voices
• Say Anything
• Sweetness & Light
• Macsmind
• Dinocrat
• Hot Air
• Captain’s Quarters
• Old War Dogs