From the WaPo:

Information captured by the National Security Agency’s secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases, current and former administration officials said…..

Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA’s information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate American citizens or to cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.

The Post, like the Times, has been trying to whip up this so-called public concern, breathlessly reporting a story of the government doing very obvious things to protect its citizens against dangerous men, mostly young, many of whom are Arabs and all of whom are Muslims, and some of whom have infiltrated the United States. One of the scandals of this reporting is that the editors at these newspapers think that this run-of-the-mill wartime activity is a story at all. In our view, this kind of reporting endangers us all.

One reason that the reporting endangers us is this: where reporters go, lawyers are sure to follow to screw things up worse. Heck, in many cases the lawyers have already been gumming up the works for a generation, as Simplicius Redivivus reminds us in its translastion of the CIA’s Michael Sheurer interview:

President Clinton, his security advisor Sandy Berger, and his terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tasked the CIA in Fall 1995 with destroying al-Qaida. We asked the President: what should we do with the people we’ve apprehended? Clinton: that’s your concern. The CIA objected: we aren’t prison guards. We were again told that we should solve the problem somehow. So we developed a procedure, and I was a member of this task force. We concentrated on al-Qaida members who were wanted in their home countries or who had been convicted there in absentia….

We had to present a huge amount of incriminating evidece to a group of lawyers….Yes, lawyers everywhere. In the CIA, in the Justice Department, in the National Security Council. We developed our list of targets under their supervision. Then we had to catch the person in a country that was prepared to cooperate with us. Finally, the person had to come from a country that was prepared to take him back. A terribly cumbersome process for a very limited group of targets.

We all know the famous line of Shakespeare on lawyers. Here’s another, from the grave scene in Hamlet: Why might not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! Too bad the bard never took on journalists as well. We will all end up like poor Yorick eventually — we only wish the reporters and lawyers would stop doing their damndest to hasten the journey.

UPDATE

There are quite a few things to like about Times’ ombudsman Byron Calame’s piece on the timing of the NSA story last month (a topic we wrote about here). This statement is not one of them:

At the outset, it’s essential to acknowledge the far-reaching importance of the eavesdropping article’s content to Times readers and to the rest of the nation. Whatever its path to publication, Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller deserve credit for its eventual appearance in the face of strong White House pressure to kill it. And the basic accuracy of the account of the eavesdropping stands unchallenged – a testament to the talent in the trenches.

It takes no courage whatsoever to publish a story “in the face of strong White House pressure to kill it” — rather the contrary. Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller can dine out on tales of their Oval Office meeting for months to the oohs and aahs of appreciative audiences. And as for the “basic accuracy,” the thrust of the entire NSA series has been the implication of illegality on the part of the executive branch, which the Times never came close to establishing for the most obvious of reasons.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 7:28 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Law, MSM, Religion, War, idiots!, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.