Frank Rich Is, Indeed, Shrill

by hilzoy

Frank Rich's column in today's NYT is, as everyone says, worth reading. Raw Story has excerpted part of it, mostly from the beginning of the column. But there are three other points I wanted to flag.

First, he has a good takedown of the claim that press accounts of administration programs have harmed our national security:

"Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists."

Second, some worthwhile background on Porter Goss:

"Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters."

And a reminder about Gen. Hayden:

" It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too."

Worth remembering.

Comments

[Step2]

It has been a long while since I read it, but the book "The Puzzle Palace" gives a detailed look inside the NSA as well as some basic tactical problems of sigint. Of course its strategic value is undeniably huge, which is why everyone does it. It does not surprise me that it took two days to translate the al-Qaeda message, and even if they had, there were no specifics that would have been helpful.

If we were to take the administration at their word that they were only using the new expanded intercept powers to hunt down terrorist, (sure!), the ability to actually sort and analyze the information effectively is virtually ruined by the all the difficulties of untangling the raw data.

[Dean Moriarity]

Boy it would be nice to see the punishment for treason enacted on those Congressmen. I'm *sure* that the administration's DOJ will be all over that.

[bob mcmanus]

Rilkefan's Four Stages of Dealing with an Blankety-blank Administration

4. Boredom.

Darn, when I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am a man, I think as a child. If you get bored, return to the imaginative play of your youth, and simply make things up. Works like a charm for me.

[rilkefan]

Rilkekind is due in a month. He's going to get so tired of hearing how bad things were when he was born and how he should appreciate how much things have improved.

[john miller]

Rilkefan, I truly hope and pray that you will be able to tell him how much better things are in a few years.

May take a little longer.

[xanax]

rilkefan: "he should appreciate how much things have improved."

Wishful thinking, rilkefan, or do you know something we don't (other than the obvious fact GWB will no longer be POTUS)?

[rilkefan]

I'm an optimist. Well-governed, this country should thrive, and we should help the world thrive. And given the lesson we've been having, the voters and even the parties are likely to choose competence next time.

[Frank Wilhoit]

"Long ago, and far away, in the top of a dark tower, lived an ogre..."

How many traditional stories from feudal Europe begin this way? They were allegories: the ogre is the landowner.

The Bush Administration does not lie. It tells stories. It comes in practice to much the same thing, as the stories are not true; but stories are not even supposed to be true--literally, or perhaps at all.

When stories are being told it is useless to look at the storyteller. Look instead at the audience. Watch their faces. The stories are, after all, only and precisely the stories that the audience demands to hear.

Mr. Bush's people do not know, and cannot imagine, any enemies other than domestic ones. Undefinable terms like terrorism (and communism before it), fictional places like Iraq and Iran (and Russia before them), are merely allegories. The real enemy is urban civilization.

Feudalism endured for many centuries, but was finally destroyed by the imaginations of storytellers. Urban civilization has lost the battle of the stories: lost it in the blink of an eye, but overwhelmingly. The citydweller, with his education and his art and his privacy, is the ogre, and he will be destroyed.

Somewhere, far away, lives a terrorist; but right across the road lives my neighbor, and he has a bullet with my name on it, and the Republican Party incited him to put it there.

They acted for topical factional advantage and without seriousness. They had no notion of the gravity, or of the inevitable results of what they did. These are not excuses: they ought rather to be regarded as aggravating factors. The legal terms of art include "reckless disregard" and "depraved indifference".

The feudal landowners had neither wit nor wherewithal to record their defense for later generations. Their case goes unargued. Perhaps they had none. We do. We must speak to posterity. In a thousand or two thousand years, learning will revive. Let it then be clear who the ogres were.

[xanax]

rilkefan: "And given the lesson we've been having, the voters and even the parties are likely to choose competence next time."

Like, for example, the way they did in the 2004 elections? (Sort of like second marriages: The triumph of optimism over experience.)

[CharleyCarp]

Like, for example, the way they did in the 2004 elections?

I was going to say 1984. Although 1988 would've done just as well. (And, yes, I don't think that 'competence' can be said to have driven the results of 1976 and 1992 either).

Glad you're an optimist RF. Sorry to say, though, that we're not yet the kind of people you're hoping we'll become, and that we haven't shown much aptitude for growing in that direction.

[rilkefan]

The lesson had to be presented in a way accessible to those not paying attention.

[rilkefan]

"Glad you're an optimist RF."

Maybe just a naif. But it seems we've got so much going for us that we'd have to really work hard to mess it up, esp. after the kick in the pants we're getting.

[xanax]

RF: "we'd have to really work hard to mess it up"

**cough...ostrich...cough, cough**

[KCinDC]

RF, congressional Democrats still haven't learned not to talk to Adam Nagourney for his periodic "Democrats are losers" pieces, so I'm not sure how well the lessons are going.

But it seems we've got so much going for us that we'd have to really work hard to mess it up...

And this differs from the situation in 2004 how?

[rilkefan]

Jeez, how can anybody compare today to '04?

My guess is that Nagourney can't not be talked to, and talking to him isn't much better. My guess is he asked them "Is there an argument to be made that not winning now would be better?" and they presented it before going on to give the counterarguments. But hey, why not go tell Billmon he's an idiot?

[CharleyCarp]

congressional Democrats still haven't learned not to talk to Adam Nagourney

[Sputtering in Impotent Rage]

How anyone has failed to get this message is just totally beyond my understanding. And if you have to talk to him, tell him we're going to kick the other guys' butts.

[argo0]

While I find myself nodding in complete agreement on the first two excerpts, I can't agree with the third. That message really only has meaning in retrospect, and even if its ambiguity could have been decoded, Hayden wasn't Michael Brown, knowing what's going on as it's happening yet not acting. He had no direct role here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sold on Hayden by any stretch -- it just seems like this is one charge that's not reasonable to stick on him.

[rilkefan]

Good stuff re Nagourney.

[Nell]

Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists."

As, indeed, it does.

Brian Ross and Rob Esposito of ABC report:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

And they wonder why we're shrill. I wonder why so many of them aren't.

[john miller]

"this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists"

Which, of course, is exactly what many on the right have been calling for, so they won't fight this.

[KCinDC]

Hmm, RF, so maybe the congressional Democrats are finally learning about Nagourney after all. Unfortunately as long as he can find some person wandering the street who can be described as a Democrat and will give him the quotes he wants, he can keep writing his articles.

[spartikus]

And they wonder why we're shrill. I wonder why so many of them aren't.

If there's anything positive in this, this may be the outrage too far as far as the MSM. If it isn't...well...game over.

[sammler]

Erm... voting to confirm the appointees of a President is "treason" because that President is unpopular?

Sorry, guys, you are nuts. Visibly nuts. Step back and take a deep breath.