Dean's World

So yesterday the big news "broke" that in 2002 the President authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspected terrorist telephone conversations without a warrant--if it was on a phone conversation where one of the parties was out of the country. The Queen is angry. I am not. Legal analyst Mark Levin notes: "The Foreign Intelligence Security Act permits the government to monitor foreign communications, even if they are with U.S. citizens -- 50 USC 1801, et seq. A FISA warrant is only needed if the subject communications are wholly contained in the United States and involve a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power."

Thus, the government could already do this. It is not new. This reminds me of the ludicrous posturing people make over so-called "sneak-and-peak" warrants, acting as if these warrants are some new and damning power when in fact the government has had the power to do those things for literally decades. If you want to change that, fine, but pretending it's something new and amazing just to score cheap political points for one party or the other makes no sense at all.

I also find this latest hooh-hah rather ironic; I well remember how back in 2002 most people were saying they hoped the government would do things like that in order to prevent terrorist attacks. But now, three years later, they're outraged? It reminds me of the people who three years ago were screaming that we should torture any terror suspects to get whatever we needed out of them, and people were talking about things like needles under fingernails and shock treatments and such--and now, often the very same people shriek that putting panties on a guy's head or letting a dog bark at him is outrageous, heinous and shameful "torture."

A lot of people are also noting the timing of this "breaking news." It turns out that the New York Times knew the story and sat on it for an entire year before choosing to release it as front page news. And what day did they pick? Why, by complete coincidence, the day after the historic Iraqi elections to elect a permanent 4 year government under their own Constitution.

Amazing, that.

Goldstein has similar thoughts, and a link roundup.

At first I thought this business of surveillance of phone conversations between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists overseas was no big deal. Then I realized it is a big deal. We've been doing things like this for decades, yes, and that's not a secret and it's not illegal. But it was a secret that we were now doing it specifically to go after Al Qaeda, that the rules had changed. Now Al Qaeda's been put on notice that we're doing it, and on how we're doing it, and how they can work around it.

Mike Hendrix says this is much ado about nothing. Tom McMahon says the New York Times must be asked some tough questions. Gateway Pundit says the leakers should be frog-marched to the hoosegow. Goldstein is sympathetic to that view. Instapundit says this initially looked bad for the President, but by next week everyone will realize it looks way worse for the leakers.

I think they are all being rather timid. These leakers have exposed a perfectly legal, perfectly sensible government operation that has undoubtedly helped round up hundreds of members of Al Qaeda and saved the lives of countless Americans. Exposing such a secret program is not whistle-blowing--it is high treason.

When I say "treason" I don't mean it in an insulting or hyperbolic way. I mean in a literal way: we need to find these 21st century Julius Rosenbergs, these modern day reincarnations of Alger Hiss, put them on trial before a jury of their peers, with defense counsel. When they are found guilty, we should then hang them by the neck until the are dead, dead, dead.

No sympathy. No mercy.

Am I angry? You bet I am. But not in an explosive way. Just in the same seething way I was angry on 9/11. These people have endangered American lives and American security. They need to be found, tried, and executed.

The following is in reaction to some comments, trackbacks, and emails I've recently received regarding the treasonous scum who recently blew the cover of an important National Security Agency operation:

It is not illegal for the U.S. government to listen to conversations of American citizens. It never has been. This may disturb you, this may bother you, this may be something you want to change, but you've never lived in an America where it wasn't true. It is nothing new to the current administration, at all.

What is illegal is for the government to use such eavesdropping in order to blackmail you ("you" meaning American citizens or legal residents), or in order to charge you with a crime. That's illegal, and there have long been numerous protections against it, all of them still active. Thus the technology is only for espionage. It's been this way for as long as any of us has been alive. See, for example, this 60-Minutes piece from 2000--you know, back when Clinton was still President? You can look a lot further back than that, too. (Link via Professor Reynolds.)

We have been using this technology to snoop in on the conversations of ordinary Americans, by phone and radio, for decades. The main protection we have from it, aside from the fact that there are tons of protections the courts and the Congress have provided, is the fact that no human being can possibly listen to every conversation every American has anyway. It's impossible. All they can do is use computers to monitor people they suspect of being spies or enemy agents, or to search for random words in the bitstream in order to look for suspicious activity. Not to arrest everyday people, but to find terrorists overseas, hunt them down, and kill them.

I can say, "bomb, bomb, bomb, destroy, kill, murder" all I want. Likely that gets logged somewhere if it's in email, or in a phone conversation--and likely it will be somewhere that I put it on this blog.

So what? So nothing.

The only difference is now that if you're talking to a terrorist buddy on the phone overseas, the government computers will not only listen, but those who run the computers will immediately act on the information--not to arrest you, but to find your terrorist friend overseas and kill him. Indeed, if you have terrorist friends, you may actually benefit, since the government won't be able to lock you up for evidence they gathered while you were plotting with your buddies on the phone. It's only your buddies who die; you likely get to walk off scot-free. Because you're an American and you have those rights to protect you even though you're vermin.

All this isn't counting the fact that the program has regular oversight by senior members of Congress, Judges, and independent members of the executive branch.

As for those who blew the cover off this completely legitimate covert operation? It's not that they revealed the program itself existed, since that's been known for decades. What they revealed was the vital information that we no longer used the technology passively against them, in order to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules to gently arrest them and extradite them to countries where they'd tried. They revealed that we're using the technology to actively hunt them down to kill them. They underscored that the technologies aren't just rumors, and that our enemies should go out of their way to be careful to protect themselves.

Those who revealed this information are not "whistle-blowers." They are traitors. I'm old-fashioned, so I prefer a public hanging or firing squad in response. After a speedy trial at which they were given their full rights to legal representation and a jury of their peers of course.

I'll gladly volunteer to pull the lever or trigger.

Their motivations are irrelevant. It's their actions that matter.

Update: Southern California Law Blog has a fairly balanced link roundup.

Legal scholar Orin Kerr has a legal analysis of the NSA's use of international phone calls made to catch and/or kill foreign terrorists. He concludes that Constitutionally the case is murky at best, which confirms what most other legal analysts have said, and also that the program probably violates the letter of FISA law, which most legal sources I've seen also agree it probably (technically) does.

What I find amusing about the latter is that it's pretty clear the FISA technical violation is trivial and has been moot for decades.

If that statute were taken literally, Project ECHELON, which is the technology under question here, would be in violation of that statue every single day, and would have been in violation of it for well over two decades, throughout multiple administrations and with the full knowledge of countless members of Congress and countless judges. Despite some grousing about it, most have wound up admitting that it's legal, and Constitutional, and probably a good thing although it could be abused.

ECHELON monitors all international telephone traffic in or out of the US, and a good deal else besides, and has for decades. If you've ever made an international phone call ECHELON probably caught it and at least temporarily stored it. You don't have to like it, but it's always been true.

The way they get around domestic laws has long been understood: there are numerous countries that participate in ECHELON. If a government needs something that's in technical violation of its domestic laws, it asks one of the other participating countries to get them the information, in a quid pro quo arrangement. If the Canadian government needs something their laws technically make thorny, they ask the US government to do it for them, or the UK government, or one of the other participants.

So in this case, the question usually becomes: what are they asking the other countries for, and what are they using it for? Are they using it to prosecute or blackmail U.S. citizens or legal residents? Nope. They're using it to identify enemy combatants on foreign soil, in order to locate them and kill them, or at least foil their plots.

Go USA!

Again: none of this is new. It's all been going on for decades. If you want to change it, great. If you're going to blame one administration for it, you probably need to look to Reagan if not Carter. If you just want to change it, period, you need to stop being emotional and start framing it in terms that can reasonably be expressed in law or policy.

TM Lutas says it very well: Essentially, what the executive order did was change the rules for which intercepted conversations were subject to human scrutiny. It's absurd to think that already intercepted conversations cannot be listened to by agents of the executive absent a warrant. What is going on is not a new search but rather analysis of an already ongoing search, a search that's been continually conducted in the world for decades. So if this search was OK during the Clinton administration (ECHELON far predates it) during peacetime, the exigencies of wartime mean we should blind our existing eyes? What kind of nonsense is this?

And no one's civil rights are abused here that I can see. Despite the fact that they could have just brazened this whole thing out, the Bush administration should be commended for informing FISA judges of what they were doing, for informing senior members of both houses and both parties in Congress of what they were doing, and for conducting periodic reviews with all those people to make sure they were doing things right.

If someone wants to change the rules, I'd love to hear the proposals, but I for one will rabidly oppose any law which attempts to say, "you cannot using existing decades-old technologies to identify and kill enemy combatants overseas without a warrant."

I'm comfortable with requiring them to get a warrant to specifically make a U.S. person the subject of prosecution. But they already have that requirement, and follow it. So what else do you want?

Postscript: It occurred to me after writing this that these specific arguments probably aren't being heard much because no one in the government is making them explicite in public. Although you can tell by how some of them are phrasing things that they're struggling, trying not to just spell it out the way I have here.

The reasoning's been clear to me all along, but this is probably because I've known about programs like ECHELON for some time. I've had family and friends involved in some of this stuff for a long, long time, and read quite a bit about how national and international espionage operate. No one's tipped me off to top secret data mind you, but I know a lot about how democracies keep secrets and conduct espionage. It's always has been fascinating how open, democratic governments skirt the edges of their own rules on a regular basis just to keep certain secrets and get certain surveillance information on their enemies (and, occasionally, their friends).

A lot of people in Washington are engaging in a bit of a Kabuki dance here. No one wants to just say, "yeah this is how we weasel around the law, it's how we've weaseled around it for decades and we aren't all comfortable with it but it's how the game is played." There are also, quite likely, secret court decisions and executive orders which have been issued over the last two decades which no one wants to mention because they don't want to tip off enemies with too much information on the limits of the technology or the full extent to which they'll stretch their own rules. And by "they" I don't mean this administration, I mean everyone involved in national security issues, including multiple administrations and members of all three branches of government.

Ranting partisan bomb-throwers like Teddy Kennedy or Bob Barr can say what they want. Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and in both the Democratic and Republican leadership, have been quite a bit more circumspect in how they phrase their objections or concerns in public. There's a reason for this: they all know pretty well what's been going on and have all along.

Get a load of these notes from Senator John Rockefeller on post-9/11 intelligence operations.

Let me translate the Senator's notes into English for you:

"I'm sorry Mr. Vice President, but I'm just a caveman. Your world of 'legal oversight of covert intelligence operations' just bewilders me. I'm only an Unfrozen Caveman Senator and Senior Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I can't be expected to understand your subtle concepts like 'statutory interpretation' or 'constitutional authority' or 'covert operations.' When I hear about them I think of demons and witches. I'm just a caveman, it's how I think! All I know is I'm confused and frightened...."

And the Senator not only releases this document, but the Democratic National Committee proudly puts it on their own web site?

John McIntyre over on Real Clear Politics has it right: "One would think that after the political miscalculations the Democrats made during the 2002 and 2004 campaigns they would not make the same mistake a third time, but it is beginning to look a lot like Charlie Brown and the football again."

We have here a program that the U.S. government has had in place for over 20 years that monitors every single international call placed into or out of the U.S. One statute says it can't be used to listen in on a conversation if one party is a U.S. citizen or legal resident, but other precedents and statutes say it can be depending on what you're doing... and Democrats, rather than simply saying they want a bit more voice in the process to make sure civil rights aren't being trampled, instead act as if they want to expose and debate every possible detail of top secret national security operations.

Why? Because they "just don't trust this administration."

Will someone at the Democratic National Committee put me in charge please? These people could absolutely neutralize the Republicans on national security issues quite easily, and then slug it out entirely on issues at home where they just might win. Instead it's like Republicans just put a big "kick me, I'm soft on national security" sign on their backs and they're too stupid to notice.

No, even that's being too kind. It's like they put the sign on their own backs. What's the immortal line from Plan 9 From Outer Space? "A stronger world power. A *stronger* world power! You see, you see! You're stupid! Stupid!" I expect to hear Howard Dean utter just such a line any day now. Jesus tap-dancing Christ...

(In tribute to the late great Phil Hartman.)

Update: Retired intelligence officer Emily Francona has some comments. I'm thinking maybe she's just a confused Unfrozen Cavechick Spy.... (Via Goldstein, who has more.)

Update 2: Law student Leon H. looks at both the case law and other relevant statutes, not just FISA.

Jay Cost explains why a Democratic recapture of the House or Senate in 2006 is unlikely.

Jay was, bar none, the best source of analytical poll-punditry leading up to the 2004 elections in the blogosphere. His depth of knowledge on polling and campaigning was impressive and his explanations cogent, detailed and enlightening. Hopefully, the Horse Race Blog will return for 2006; I strongly recommend his writing to all who are interested in campaign politics.

The Queen notes the legal authority that all Presidents have to conduct warrantless surveillance in obtaining foreign intelligence. It's how the Clinton justice department nabbed Aldrich Ames, just for example.

It's fascinating to watch all these people spinning their wheels trying to claim that this is a new and frightening development, a horrible overreach, a unilateral power grab, and so on. It is none of those things, and it certainly is not a violation of anybody's civil rights.

That some people just don't pay attention to any of that tells you a lot more about them than it does about the current administration.

Yesterday, Dave Price suggested that Democrats are not very likely to take back control the House of Representatives in the 2006 mid-term elections, coming up in 11 months. (See the related article linked below). Joe Gandelman, meanwhile, is quoting Howard Fineman and suggesting that 2006 may be our nastiest political season yet. I don't take issue with any of it except Fineman's claim that only a few in the executive branch knew about the NSA's surveillance of international calls--we know that's not true at all.

And that brings up what to me look like very bad signs for Democrats: I begin to suspect that they may wind up losing seats once again. This is not a "wish fulfillment" prediction. It's simply what I begin to think: moderate losses in the House and probably the Senate for the Democrats.

It's important to understand that this would be odd. Historically, elections in non-Presidential years typically yield gains for whichever party is out of power in the White House. So we would expect 2002 and 2006 to go fairly well for Democrats, what with a Republican in the White House. If the Democrats were in power in the White House, the Republicans could expect to do moderately well in the off-year elections.

In recent memory there have been only two off-year elections which did not follow that pattern: 1998 and 2002. In 1998, an angry, rhetoric-bomb-throwing Republican congress that engineered multiple government shutdowns got spanked by voters; in a year when they should have picked up anywhere from 4 to 30 seats in the House, they lost 5. This was such an embarrassment that Newt Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House.

The other exception was 2002, where Democrats were spanked for perceived weakness on national security. It wasn't entirely fair, as their leaders in the House and Senate had helped pass the Patriot Act and the Iraq war resolution. But they had held up passage of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security because they wanted to make sure DHS employees could unionize. The President also hit the campaign trail hard and talked about not just about the need to form a Department of Homeland Security, but a lot of other issues, including judges and social security reform. It fired up his base, and demoralized Democrats.

The Democrats came back in 2004 full of rage and bitter acrimony, embracing Michael Moore's vicious Fahrenheit 9/11, Howard Dean's hordes of internet-based Bush-haters, and the MoveOn.org crowd--and not only lost decisively in the Presidential election, but lost even more House and Senate seats.

Now historical forces would seem to suggest 2006 will be good for Democrats. After all, Bush's approval ratings are below 50%. But what are Democrats doing? Apparently, they're doing their level best to look weak and untrustworthy on national security.

They're holding up renewal of the Patriot Act--yes, with the help of a few Republicans, but it's mostly their issue and everybody knows it. Furthermore, they're trying to make major hay out of the NSA monitoring overseas phone calls. This is unbelievably dumb. I'll go on record right now and make a prediction: the vast majority of Americans will turn out to be glad the NSA is monitoring international calls for terrorist activity, and will vote against anyone who wants to require a judge's warrant for each and every target being monitored.

Election day will be November 7, 2006. Go on, quote that prediction back at me come November 8. Voters will not vote for the party that pledges to require warrants in order to listen in on international phone calls that might help identify and kill terrorists overseas. Indeed, they'll vote to punish whichever party demands such a thing.

Oh, and Heaven help the Democrats if there is another successful terrorist attack any time in the next 11 months. The Republicans will immediately blame Democrats, accusing them of gutting national security by holding up renewal of the Patriot Act, and of hamstringing a vital National Security program to monitor international phone calls. They'll be absolutely merciless about it--and Democrats will be unable to come up with a retort that resonates with voters.

Think I'm wrong? We'll get a chance to find out, as Democrats seem convinced that they need to make this their issue. If they do, and if they keep uttering the word "impeachment," the Republicans will have a very successful Get Out The Vote effort in '06, and moderate voters will, once again, find themselves thinking that Democrats simply do not take national security seriously.

This is not my wish, by the way. It's a prediction. I won't feel elated if I'm right, or crushed if I'm wrong. It's just what I see happening.

My advice for the Democrats would be to stop this immediately. This should be an easy needle for them to thread. Here's what my recommendations would look like for Democrats:

1) Come out and loudly embrace the idea of the NSA monitoring international phone traffic to help locate terrorists and kill them, without warrants. State openly that you think this is a terrific idea. However, demand a bipartisan congressional and judicial review panel that will monitor how these calls are used to prevent abuse of the rights of innocent Americans. Make clear that you think this is a tremendously good idea, but no President should be able to make these choices unilaterally. (Bush isn't really doing it unilaterally, but no one will object to greater oversight.)

2) Repudiate the notion that we're going to simply unilaterally withdraw from Iraq. Keep making noises about working hard to get the Iraqis self-sufficient so they don't need our help anymore. Sure we're already doing that, but make it very clear that this is absolutely what you want.

3) By taking national security away from Repoublicans, Democrats can concentrate on economic security for the middle class, which is what's really on voters' minds at home. "Terrorists: we will work with the President to do whatever it takes to find them and kill them. Now, let's talk about jobs..."

In short: the more Democrats try to take on the Republicans on national security, the worse they'll look. The more Democrats talk like Republicans are dangerous, the more like dangerous lunatics the Democrats look themselves.

The average voter can see the obvious: the NSA's program to monitor overseas calls in order to find and kill terrorists is not a threat to any American's liberty. Curtailing our ability to find and kill terrorists is a threat to all our liberty. Most voters will make that calculation in their own heads, and Democrats are fools to deny it.

Update:

National Journal's The Hotline also thinks that 2006 will be a replay of 2002 if Democrats keep on their current path.

National Journal is not a right-wing or Republican publication, in case you were wondering.

Honestly the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Democrats are being just unbelievably stupid. Opposition to the Patriot Act and wanting to end telephone surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas. Yes, that's really going to convince voters in '06 that they can be trusted with national security. [/sarcasm]

Here's the Justice Department's full response to spurious accusations that any law was broken or anyone's civil liberties infringed by surveillance of international phone calls for the purposes of locating and killing terrorists on foreign soil: Memo from the office of the Attorney General.

It contains numerous citations of relevant court cases.

So once again we see: there is no infringement of civil rights, there is no violation of the law, there is only a fully legal, fully Constitutional enemy surveillance program backed up by countless legal precedents.

For what purpose? To arrest U.S. citizens and put them in jail? No, because that would require warrants and other rules of evidence. This is for the purposes of finding enemy combatants and killing them where they sleep.

And, as we see, the practice of regularly notifying Congress and the judiciary isn't even really necessary. But I'm glad the White House took that unnecessary step anyway. It speaks well of their character and intent.... and makes the critics look even dumber.

So. When are we going to find the people who blew the cover of this perfectly legitimate, completely common-sense program to find and kill the enemy? Because we need to find whoever endangered national security by leaking the details of this program to the press. Then we need to put them on trial, and execute them. For they are not "whistle blowers." They are traitors.

Donald Crankshaw thinks calls by bloggers such as myself for execution of the traitors who leaked details of the ECHELON change-of-policy are extreme. He points to some excellent historical examples which show that execution of traitors is rare, and how even those traitors facing the death penalty usually worm out of it.

He has a point. But I have some counterpionts:

The Rosenbergs didn't get out of it. You could argue that even though history now knows they were guilty--even the KGB admitted it--there were others guilty of worse at the time. What of it? Even Eisenhower said that it was necessary to send a message: if you've got security clearance and you violate it, the punishment is severe. So decide your loyalty and make your career choices right now.

I would also note that none of Don's examples were incidents of exposing state secrets during a time of declared war. The Cold War was real enough, true, but it wasn't openly declared. The war against Al Qaeda is a declared war, one in which Congress authorized the President full powers to act, and it's a war in which both innocent civilians and American service members have been and are being killed. It's an enemy that took 3,000+ lives on September 11 and would happily take ten or a hundred times that many in the blink of an eye if it could.

We have here a set of policies approved by the President, vetted by numerous attorneys at the Justice Department, with regular oversight by the Select Intelligence committees of both houses of Congress AND by judges who deal with intelligence questions. That's as legitimate as it gets when it comes to state secrets.

I say the message needs to be sent loud and clear: loose lips are not acceptable. If you're not comfortable with policy decisions made by the current administration, fine, but that does not give you license to start spewing everything you know. That is every bit as treasonous as what Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss did.

If you're working anywhere in the intelligence community, with any level of security clearance, and you radically disagree with those in charge of prosecuting it, time to resign and find another job. You do not turn traitor, giving valuable information to our enemies about what the exact limit and shape of our surveillance capabilities and policies are, just so you can tell yourself you're a heroic "whistle blower."

They aren't "whistle blowers," because there are many perfectly legal and honorable ways to express reservations and raise any strenuous objections you have if you work for CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA, or related agencies. Thus, the proper word is "traitor." To be more colorful, the phrase would be "treasonous turncout Benedict Arnolds." Dring a time of an openly declared war the appropriate punishment for such people is execution.

Maybe I'm harsh. Maybe 10-20 years of hard labor would suffice. If so, let's start with seeking the death penalty, and then give the traitors some time for appeals and for plea bargains and for sobbing begging. Then we can give the yellow-bellied turncoat bastards the opportunity to snitch on their friends in exchange for leniency. If they'll sell out their country so cheaply, they'll surely sell out their friends to save their own worthless skins from the hangman's noose.

Will the Bushies actually have the iron will needed to do this? Probably not. Then again, they may surprise us. They're already investigating the leaks. Let's see how far they're willing to go once they have the names of some of these snivelling, despicable, fascist boot-licking quislings.

The American Thinker suggests that Senators Durbin, Wyden, and Ki-Rockefeller may be under investigation for leaking classified information.

Although there would be a horrifying irony to that, I must point out that the American Thinker doesn't seem to be thinking too clearly. Their source for this is NewsMax. I searched Google News for any other sources on this, and found nothing but NewsMax. Look, no offense, but NewsMax is just a poor man's Drudge Report, and since at least a third of what appears on Drudge is total and complete crap that really isn't saying much.

As a rule you will find that Dean's World very rarely links any of the following sources:

Drudge Report
Front Page Magazine
The Nation
DailY Kos
Newsmax
WorldNet Daily
Common Dreams
SF Gate
The American Spectator

I generally encourage other bloggers to take the same tack. I mean, it's not my business what other bloggers do, I'm just saying: you'll probably find the reliability and believability of anything you post goes up when you avoid sources like this.

Mind you, I didn't say I'll never link them, nor that they never have anything of value on them. But I view them much like I view stinging insects: to be avoided if possible and, if you must handle them at all, handle them very slowly and delicately.

The Washington Times (and from what I gather, no other major media outlet) reports:

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president's constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

According to the article, these judges acknowledged, as they must, that the were not ruling on the issue as such, and that the President's actions were taken "at his peril" because — notwithstanding their views of the matter — the decision to go forward with the wiretapping would be tested both politically and legally. But it is certainly interesting that they came out so strongly on this.

I suppose one obvious question to ask, however, is whether these judges, by virtue of having been on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, were generally "intelligence friendly" (or even Republican friendly) going into the whole thing. It is remarkable that one of them is Judge Allan Kornblum, a U.S. magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He is described as an author of the 1978 FISA legislation, though I cannot figure out whom he was working for at the time.

Keep in mind that federal magistrate judges are not political appointees. Is this the same Allan Kornblum who was one of the Clinton DOJ staff members who threw up successive obstacles to broaching the "intelligence / crime wall" before September 11th? It appears that this is the same man, who has had a distinguished and unusual legal career, including gigs with the FBI and even the NYPD.

Certainly, considering his experience on various sides of this issue, it appears that his view is worth listening to seriously.

UPDATE: Pick up the story on the reporting of this story here.

I was recently informed by a friend that the blogger known as Glenn Greenwald posted something about me. And he basically suggested that I had called for the staff at the New York Times be hung by the neck until dead. Which would be an interesting suggestion, if it were true. But it is not true. Whatever else I might have said about those reactionary, illibral, fascist-loving b**tards, that is not something I ever called for, ever.

Some might think I am retroactively trying to rationalize my earlier statements, but I just ask you to read the statement in question carefully, and then just ask yourself: where did I ever call for any member of the press to be exeecuted? Because I think you can read it closely, several times over, and see I did not call for that.

Because I did not.

What I called for--and still call for, by the way--is the prosecution (legal prosecution, with all du process rights observed) of people who work for the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, or other government branches who politically disagree with whatever the government is doing, and so decide that their first course of action even in a time of war is to run to the press and spill the beans on classified programs. That's wrong. It's treasonous. And you know why it is treason? Because if you work for CIA, or DIA, or NSA, or any branch of the military, there exist perfectly legitimate mechanisms to object if you think that the government's policy is wrong somehow. There are people in the American intelligence community whose entire job is to listen to such complaints and act on them. And if that doesn't work, there are people in the Justice Department whose job is to respond to such complaints. And, if those avenues of complaint are exhausted and you still think they are not responding as they should, then, you can approach any member of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or any member of the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and express your grave concerns to them. You can even directly approach your own Senator or Congressman.

In other words, there's a whole system set up for this that you can avail yourself of. But nowhere in this system is a notion that you can just run off and whine to the press if you don't like what's happening. And, in a time of war, revealing classified information is treason.

And by the way, I actually think that even above all of that, running to the press is still part of the equation. But it has to be done honorably: "I have exhausted every avenue at my disposal, and as last resort I finally felt I had to run to the press. I know I swore an oath of secrecy, but I feel it's just so important that I have to go to the press. And I am willing to take whatever consequences happen as a result of that. Here is my name, here is who I am. I am so certain I am right that I will pay whatever price is necessary."

And then you honorably take the consequences of that. That would be an honorable person.

What does a dishonorable person do? "Well I just don't agree with what my boss says, so even though I'm entrusted with secrets as part of my job, I'm gonna run and squeal to the press because I just don't like what my bosses are doing." That to me is high treason in a time of war.

Our elected members of government, whether they are the President or members of Congress, are not rubber-stamps for the popular will. They ARE our elected leaders. Love them or hate them, that is who and what they are. They have a sacred trust to all of us, and that includes the sacred trust that they might have to keep secrets from us. And if that disturbs you, then you should think more carefully about it when you vote.

I do not think that people who work at the New York Times should be hung for reporting what treasonous vermin tell them about classified programs. I think that treasonous vermin who work for the government and spill to the press should be put on trial as traitors for revealing classified programs. Because if you work for the government you work for the President, and for the Congress, and for the Courts. You don't have to like them. You don't have to agree with them. But you work for them. And if you don't like that, then get another job. Meantim, we are in a state of declared war, and you should behave as if that is so.

As for the current staff of the New York Times: I do not think any of them have committed a capital offense. Yet I do confess that I would like nothing better than to see Bill Keller or Pinch Schulzberger duck-walked out of the New York Times's offices in Manhattan, and put on trial for knowingly and maliciously publishing national security secrets of the United States, even after being directly asked not to by the President, the Vice President, and several members of the Congress from both sides of the aisle (including even congressman Murtha). I'd like to see them tried, and to spend some time in Club Fed for that. But I wouldn't hang them.

Oh, and just so my crypto-fascist critic Greenwald doesn't misunderstand me:

My view would not change in the least if we were living under President Clinton, or President Gore, or President Kerry. Or if we were living under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid. That's irrelevant to me. I just say that if you work for the government and you agree to keep certain state secrets as part of your job, you are a treasonous bastard if you spill those secrets to the press just because you don't like your bosses. How we treat the press who report on your treason is a separate issue. I'd just hang YOU for squealing to them.

Love or hate my position, excoriate it all you want, let's at least be sure you know what my actual position is, eh?

The world is still a dangerous place, full of dictators and thug-regimes who sponsor terrorism. So if you get into this business of working for your government as a career, you don't get to decide unilaterally to spill state secrets just because you don't like our elected leaders. If you don't like that, don't go to work for the CIA, or the NSA, or the military. That's not so hard, is it?

My dear wife thinks that Glenn Greenwald may just be an illiterature moron.

That would be the charitable interpretation. The less charitable interpretation is that he is in the habit of making dishonest assertions, willfully and knowingly.

Assuming he does not issue an apology and retraction, I am going to go with "liar." Which isn't something I'm in the habit of slinging around, since I consider it a much graver insult than most things.

Why Dean Sucks: You'll learn more about it here and here.

Just for the record, there are only two reactions to the above two links which would really--honestly--offend me:

1) A bunch of "no Dean they're wrong, you rock and they suck" comments.

2) An avalanche of comments left at either blog saying why they're so horribly wrong.

Nope. It is merely this: my harshest critics have X to say. Hear them out and, if you are so inclined, discuss it with them.

It's really really hard for me to link things like this. Because I appreciate hearing from people who disagree with me. I respect it. I honestly think we all--all of us--need to hear from people who disagree with us more often. The list of all of my failings as a human being would be very, very long.

No really. Very, very long indeed.

I offer these links as discussion points. Follow them and give them your honest thoughts, if you are so inclined. Or give them to me, if you are so inclined.

There’s been a sort of ongoing scuffle between Glenn Reynolds and Glenn Greenwald for some time now, which is fascinating to me because in many ways Greenwald resembles nothing so much as a Bizarro Instapundit: while both are career law-talking-guys who claim to be civil libertarians, where one’s interests are bemusedly eclectic and expansive the other is narrowly, even bitterly focused, where Reynolds is concise and witty Greenwald is verbosely leaden, where Glenn is moderate, friendly, and reasonable The Other Glenn is hyperpartisan, vitriolic, and hyperbolic. And while I don’t know for sure, it seems safe to assume Greenwald is probably a kitten-blender.

Unfortunately hyperbole, vitriol, and verbosity seem to be most of what Greenwald brings to the table. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with vicious partisan punditry, and if Greenwald’s raison d’etre is to be a sort of Ann Coulter of the sinestrosphere, then hey, more power to him. But Ann’s diatribes against the left are readable because they always have a sort of tongue-in-cheek feel; when she talks about “liberals’ incessant treason” she knows people are rolling their eyes, and when she says (with a smile) the politically outspoken 9/11 widows are “enjoying their husbands’ deaths” she does so knowing people will say “there goes Crazy Ann again” and one gets the feeling, watching her laugh and toss her long blonde hair about, that she’s not just fine with that but employing it as an act to gain attention – and then, having got our attention, she goes on to adduce evidence for her crazy-seeming arguments, which then seem, while often still implausible (or just offensive), at least slightly less crazy.

Bizarro Glenn’s problem is that for the most part he isn’t really making arguments, but just flinging out over-the-top accusations, with little ironic humor and less evidence. Here, for example, in the same vein in which he mistook our host Dean for a “conservative,” while calling for journalists to denounce the dextrosphere he makes this unintentionally hilarious statement:

As its leading bloggers vividly illustrate, pro-Bush “conservatism” is a highly authoritarian movement which seeks to vest unlimited and unrestrained power in their Leader, views garden-variety political dissent as blasphemy and treason, and glorifies violence as a justifiable tool to achieve their glorious political ends.

Virtually everything in this sentence is ridiculous (disclosing national security secrets is garden-variety political dissent? Greenwald’s garden is apparently composed of genus Psilocybe), but let’s look at the most amusingly over-the-top tendentious part: “unlimited” and “unrestrained” power? You’d think one or the other would suffice, but I suppose if you’re going to gun down a strawman you might as well use both barrels. Of course, no one is arguing Bush’s power should have no limits: I haven’t heard anyone suggest President Bush could or should openly defy Supreme Court rulings, as the man on our $20 bill did, suspend habeas corpus for U.S. citizens as the man on the $5 bill did, or introduce legislation to change the legal structure of the Supreme Court to allow him to pack it with his people, threaten to nationalize the media if they don’t give him good war coverage, and bug them to boot, all of which the left’s sainted FDR did in the lifetimes of many alive today.

As Original Glenn has alluded to, the mendacious rhetoric employed here is nearly Orwellian (complete with Goldstein), especially as it calls for denunciations from the press. This is not an attempt at debate, this is Two Minutes Hate, and poorly done at that.

The ACLU reports:

In the first federal challenge ever argued against the Bush administration's NSA spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor rules that the program to monitor [sic] the phone calls and e-mails of millions of Americans without warrants is unconstitutional.

Hat tip to Declan McManus's email list. I think the word "monitor" is a little loaded here, but this decision is going to be a big deal. I haven't read it, wanting to rush it into your hands — and not being, personally, well informed enough to have a meaningful opinion. Even though I am a blogger.

It's the return of Ki-Rockefeller!

"I'm sorry, Mr. President, but your world of 'congressional oversight of intelligence operations and reports' just bewilders me. I'm only an Unfrozen Caveman Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I can't be expected to understand your subtle concepts like 'interpretation of intelligence reports' or 'committee hearings.' I'm just the Senior Democrat, the Unfrozen Caveman Senior Democrat in charge of Intelligence operations. When I hear about these things I think of demons and witches. All I know is I'm confused and frightened...."

(Senator Ki-Rockefeller first appeared on Dean's World here.)

The arrogant New York Times loses again.

The Supreme Court agrees with the Second Circuit: If there were a reporters' privilege under the First Amendment, it still wouldn't give you a free ticket to do absolutely anything you want to undermine your country.

Fantasmagorical, Floyd! Hat tip to Instapundit on Beldar's reemergence from that dungeon in Vulgaria. Sweet to have you back!