The Enlightened Despot

Andy McCarthy has some incredible breaking news, in a post whose title is so long, it can only be included in a blockquote with the excerpt:

“Had [President Bush's Warrantless Surveillance Program" been in place before the [9/11] attacks, hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi almost certainly would have been identified and located.”

[Really. That's the title of his post. Punchy!]

Another Friday night, another dump by the Obama administration of a report underscoring the vital importance of President Bush’s post-9/11 national security tactics.

The above quote about Midhar and Hazmi and is from Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who was director of the NSA when that agency ran Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”  It is a bombshell mentioned in passing on page 31 of the 38-page report filed by five executive branch inspectors general (from DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) pursuant to Congress’s 2008 overhaul of FISA (the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

I’ll have more to say about the report this week, but it also contains some other interesting facts that the folks who drop these reports late on summer Fridays would rather you didn’t linger over.

Other interesting facts, eh? Other than what, exactly? Unverifiable counterfactual claims are, I do believe, generally referred to as ‘opinions’ not ‘facts’. But never mind. The fact that the former CIA chief would make such a claim is pretty mindblowing. Shame on the Obama administration for hiding this bombshell in a Friday news dump.

Wait, what? Hayden made this claim three years ago, in testimony to the US Senate, and it was widely reported on then? Really?

Shit, Andy McCarthy tricked me again. Sorry, my bad. He just sounds so reasonable all the time…

UPDATE: Presumably a coincidence, but it turns out this is a great time for security hawks to do some hand waving.

With all the gloominess in the news today, it’s nice to know the guys at The Corner are still doing what they love: lying about things. In a post predicting that Obama will co-opt all of Bush’s terrific policies and rebrand them to rave reviews from the media, VDH says the following:

FISA and wire-intercepts of terrorist communications in the pre-Obama president months were once derided as more of Ashcroft-Bush stomping on the Constitution — except that now ABC News reports that, in fact, US intelligence agencies supplied India with general knowledge of the rough time period, place, and perhaps even method of terrorist attack. Are we to believe that such newfound capability to warn a country 7000 miles away about terrorist infiltration on its borders would be of no utility here at home?

I think in response what we will see is that insidiously, bit by bit, Obama and the Obama-brand press will begin to drop the shrill rhetoric about destroying constitutional liberties, and replace it with the vocabulary of ambiguity (e.g., try “complex,” “no easy answers”, “problematic”, etc.).

This is just flat out dishonest. No one has ever argued that we should just give up on intelligence altogether. Of course, no one has reported that we warned them based on information gained from warantless domestic wiretaps, and no one is going to report that, because it didn’t happen.

As far as I can tell, Hanson isn’t claiming something quite that crazy. Instead, he’s saying that we have this shiny new system for finding stuff out that is doing great work abroad (well, something seems to have gone wrong in this particular case, but still…) and we’d love to use it at home but the whiny Democrats won’t let us. But no part of this is in any way true. There is nothing ‘newfound’ about our capability to warn a country 7,000 miles away about things going on there. That’s called foreign intelligence, and we’ve always done it. Nor is there anything revolutionary about doing the same sort of thing at home. That’s called domestic intelligence, and we’ve always done that too.

What is at issue is something far more specific: warantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Some people think it’s a vital source of intel. Other people think it isn’t worth the loss of privacy rights. There is a serious debate to be had there (though the former group of people are on the wrong side of that debate, and anyway it’s illegal). But there is nothing at all serious about pointing to the existence of intelligence gathering as evidence one way or the other. It doesn’t even begin to bear on the question at issue. It is dishonest drivel, and that is the M.O. of the National Review these days.