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| Author: | Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies |
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December 21, 2005
Los Angeles Times
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…
I suspect it’ll be a long wait because the rule of thumb seems to be that although it’s treasonous for pro-Bush partisans to spill secrets that might embarrass an administration critic, it’s a public service for anti-Bush partisans to spill secrets that might embarrass the administration. The determination of which secrets are OK to reveal is, of course, to be made not by officials charged with protecting our nation but by journalists charged with selling newspapers.
The New York Times sought to quell such concerns by noting in its big article on the NSA that “some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.” Forgive me if I’m not reassured by the implication that other information that might be useful to terrorists had not been omitted.
Aside from the possible harm that these leaks could do to the war on terror, what galls me is the utter lack of context in breathless news accounts. The Washington Post ran a 1,910-word article Sunday titled “Pushing the Limits of Wartime Powers” that had only one brief mention, near the end, of the 9/11 attacks. There was no acknowledgment that this catastrophe revealed major vulnerabilities in our defenses created by post-Watergate reforms that eviscerated domestic intelligence gathering.
For instance, in August 2001, FBI agents in Minneapolis stumbled onto Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the Al Qaeda plotters. The 9/11 commission later concluded that a “maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui…might have brought investigators to the core of the 9/11 plot.” But officials didn’t seek a warrant to search his laptop because they lacked “probable cause” under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA is the law that Bush is now accused of circumventing.
If Bush really broke the law, that is, of course, wrong. But the president has a strong legal case. (Even liberal legal scholar Cass Sunstein says, “I think the [congressional] authorization of use of military force is probably adequate as an authorization for surveillance.”)
The president has an even stronger moral case. Before condemning him, ask yourself why there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 2001. Not one. It’s hard to know the exact reason we’ve been spared, but surely part of our good fortune should be attributed to the very measures—the Patriot Act, the NSA surveillance, the renditions, the enhanced interrogation techniques—that are now being pilloried by self-righteous journalists and lawmakers.
Bush has not always gotten the balance between “life” and “liberty” exactly right. He erred by not granting terrorist detainees any recourse to the courts—a mistake fixed by the Supreme Court. But the president has been a lot more right than his most perfervid critics, who seem to think that we can defeat a vicious foe without compromising any peacetime rights and without keeping any secrets.
The way things are going, with Congress refusing to reauthorize the Patriot Act and banning “degrading” interrogation methods, we may soon find out if the civil libertarians are right. Heaven help us if they’re not.
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