Kerry Gets The Boot

The Boston Balker the other day called President Bush's factual defense of his NSA anti-terror wiretap program "lame" (meaning Kerry couldn't substantively refute it) and said that there was no comparison at all between the horrible abuse of power that was the "Plamegate" non-event and the patriotic duty that was the leak of the NSA program:

"The leak in the White House was an effort to destroy somebody and his family and attack them for telling the truth," the senator said.

"The leak that took place in this case is a leak that — I'm not excusing it — is to tell the truth about something that violates the rights of Americans and doesn't uphold our Constitution," Kerry said.

Except, of course, that there was no White House leak, no effort to "destroy somebody and his family," and those "somebodies" lied through their whitened teeth to attack the President.

As the the other half of this equation, the L.A. Times' Max Boot had something to say about that:

Since [the "Plamegate" kerfuffle] there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of "renditions" to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Virginia. We don't know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …I suspect it'll be a long wait because the rule of thumb seems to be that although it's treasonous for pro-Bush partisans to spill secrets that might embarrass an Administration critic, it's a public service for anti-Bush partisans to spill secrets that might embarrass the Administration. The determination of which secrets are OK to reveal is, of course, to be made not by officials charged with protecting our nation but by journalists charged with selling newspapers.

And let's be clear on another contrast - no laws were broken in the "revelation" of Valerie Wilson's "identity," but the series of leaks to which Mr. Boot makes reference is flatly illegal. And, according to no less an authority than law Professor John Eastman, treasonous as well:

HH: John Eastman, a question for you. Does the President of the United States, in time of war, have the authority to order the surveillance of our enemies abroad in touch with their agents operating in the United States?

JE: Of course.

HH: Does he have that authority even if those agents operating in the United States are American citizens?

JE: Yes, he does.

HH: And does he have that authority, even if he does not have a warrant to conduct that surveillance?

JE: Yes, he does, and look. This authority comes directly from Article 2 of the Constitution. Every president going back to George Washington has recognized this. The president that signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 specifically, said that of course, this can't be considered a constraint on the powers that the president has directly under Article 2. That president was Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan or George Bush. This is a pretty well-established incident of war. And what's most surprising to me is that what the New York Times, and whoever in the Department of Justice, or in the National Security Agency leaked this ongoing tool in that war, have very likely committed treason. I mean, it's tantamount to somebody in England discovering that Churchill had....and the Churchill administration had figured out the enigma code for the German coding maching, and had revealed that, so that that tool could no longer be used in the prosecution of the war. This really is over the top.

One rumor sizzling around Washington, D.C. now is that the leaker of the NSA program might be none other than Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller IV himself, the same man who galavanted around the Middle East four years ago giving every dictator he visited a heads-up about Operation Iraqi Freedom, and whipped out his supposed 2002 CYA letter to Dick Cheney expressing his "concerns" about the NSA eavesdropping program not two weeks after kissing Big Time's ass about it. Rocky would join a number of his Donk colleagues in the legal crosshairs for exposing another secret CIA technology program a year ago.

Double-H calls this "going Ahab." I'd call it "going Benedict Arnold," myself, but whatever the differences in detail, one commonality bears remembering: neither man met a happy end. In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab's obsession with killing the great white whale that crippled him ends up destroying both him and his ship. And Benedict Arnold was never really trusted after he defected to the British, never accepted in English society, and died broken, bitter, and penniless.

It would be delicious irony to see three or four Democrat senators end up getting "frog-marched" out of the Capitol for their lawless effort to destroy the twice-elected POTUS over his legal efforts to protect the American people against another mass terrorist attack.

I wonder what lame rejoinder Senator Kerry would have to that.