Say Anything Blog

Clarice Feldman

(Clarice Feldman is an attorney in Washington, DC and a frequent contributor to American Thinker.)

Since there has been so much leftie BS on this subject at SA lately, I thought this might be of some interest. It’s a lengthy article, but here’s the meat:

Alberto Gonzales Agonistes

Democrats are playing political games with national security and mongering phony scandal. It amounts to a program of harassment of the Bush Administration’s efforts to defend us against attack by uncovering terror plots using intelligence agencies.

It has been nothing short of a miracle that we have been spared another attack after 9/11; this has occurred through the Administration’s use of various techniques almost all of which were leaked to the press. National security secrets were disclosed with no punishment to the leakers or publishers at all.

I’m talking about leaks of real national security significance—the terrorist surveillance program and the operation of the “Swift” consortium to track and block terrorist financing, for example—not the revelation of the identity of a non-covert CIA employee. Through it all, the President has labored to protect us from our enemies. And he has done so despite the media and Democrat efforts to make each and every useful program ineffective, by pinched readings of the law and selective damaging disclosures.

Now, the very Democrats who fought the programs and demanded a narrow reading of the law governing them are refusing to make the changes necessary to allow the programs to utilize our technological advantage in this sphere of an unconventional war. As the Wall Street Journal notes:

At least a few Democrats realize they may be setting themselves up for trouble if there’s another terrorist attack. House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes wrote to Mr. Bush last week saying he was “very concerned” about the program and urging the Administration to “devote all the resources necessary to ensure that we are conducting maximum surveillance of the terrorist target abroad.”

Mr. Reyes went on to note that “FISA does not require a warrant for communications between two individuals outside the United States. If clarifications to the law are necessary, we are prepared to deal with this.” That’ll serve Mr. Reyes well as political cover if the next 9/11 Commission asks who ruined the terrorist surveillance program. But if he’s serious about national security, he should send his next letter to Senate Democrats.

But the very Senators who are in a position to fashion the necessary legal changes to make the surveillance programs work better are the same Senators who have been trying to force the Administration to publicly reveal the very last bit of the program which has not yet been leaked. They have been unsuccessful at it, and have used the straw horse issue of the firing of some US attorneys as a means of forcing the Attorney General to publicly divulge the information.

And since that has proved unsuccessful, they accused him of committing perjury when he explained what he could publicly about it. He’s been vindicated, but the media and Democrats are doing their best not to mention it.

It’s beyond serious dispute that, as Executive Branch appointments, the President can fire any US attorney he wishes to for any reason. Certainly it would be inappropriate if there were evidence-which despite countless hearings there is not-that the action was designed to interfere with a legitimate legal proceeding or inquiry. But the Democrats have failed to come close to establishing that there was a single thing inappropriate in these firings. That hasn’t stopped Senate Judiciary Committee’s Leahy and Schumer from harassing the Attorney General and his staff and, worse, suggesting that he lied to the Committee.

Once again, as in the Libby case, the principle players include Senator Charles Schumer and former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, two dramatis personae who regularly eat the scenery on the set. And once again the story is more glitter than gold.

[...]

Or they can move on and concede what we all know-for all the noise generated by manipulating a willing-to-be-gulled media, there is no pony in there.

Read the whole thing.

More lying and waste of public money by the Dems.