Abracadabrah<br><br><i> I create as I speak</i>: Able Danger and the NSA Surveillance Kerfuffle UPDATE

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Able Danger and the NSA Surveillance Kerfuffle UPDATE

After all the angst this fall about why the President didn't pursue the Able Danger story more strongly to castigate - heh - his critics - and point out the inadequacies and failures of intel in the Clinton Administration, we finally have the answer.

This NSA kerfuffle clearly overlaps with the datamining approach used in the Able Danger program. And, given the threat of this story being published by the NYTimes hanging, like the sword of Damocles, over the President's head, he didn't want anyone pointing at anything similar. Also, criticism of the Clinton approach to data mining might have been sufficient provocation by NYTimes editors to tip this story into publication. So far, of course, they have refused to say why they did, in fact, publish the story when they did.

I think in this explanation we can also see why Cobweb - that is, Vice President Cheney - demanded insistent, blanketing silence on this story - the Administration's desire was to get the very few people discussing Able Danger simply to shut up and go away. And when the story continued, kept alive by the blogosphere, there was a promise of money to intelligence programs favored by Curt Weldon with the tacit agreement built in that he, too, would shut up.

The Administration couldn't make public use of the Able Danger story, because an attempt to investigate that might lead media investigators to discover this NSA story, the secret of which was so tenuously held. And which the President and Vice President already had good reason to know had its detractors and people who would leak about it given the opportunity and the "correct" incentives. And keeping the integrity of that program going was far more important to them than partisan sniping about the Clinton's Administration's failed effort to stop Mohammed Atta in his tracks.

UPDATES:

Rich Lowry at National Review points out that so far the only player who has been held by a court probably to have violated the Constitution is Judge James Robertson. Yes, the same Judge whose recent retirement from the court was lauded proclaimed - on the basis of no evidence - as his decision to withdraw because he was disgusted by the Bush Admin's encroachments of the law.

Uri Dan writes about the perception of the NSA kerfuffle from the Israeli perspective:

The average Israeli finds it difficult to grasp the argument: After all, it is the wiretapping and bugging of every possible kind carried out by Israel's security and intelligence services that have become a key weapon in stemming the wave of terror let loose by Yasser Arafat and Marwan Barghouti, and which is continuing even under the impotent management of Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel has continually honed its eavesdropping methods to an art in its struggle against terrorists and spies, and in order to obtain timely warnings of impending attacks. It uses wiretapping to eliminate the terrorist leaders and stop suicide bombers in their tracks.

IF I am not mistaken, the fruits of Israeli wiretapping for security reasons have never been used against Israeli citizens unless real acts of treason were involved; and in most of those cases, the Israelis involved - Arabs and Jews alike - were brought to justice...

At a time when the US and other democracies are still being threatened by international Islamist terror, one might ask why the Times and other American papers of its ilk are working so hard to undermine the status of President Bush, who is only now completing the first year of his second term.

The answer is pure hatred - hatred harbored by the liberal Left for anything that symbolizes strength and resilience of the kind demonstrated by the Bush administration in this terrible war.