Under The Weather

I'm currently struggling with a very, very bad head cold. Regular posting to resume shortly, just as soon as I begin to feel vaguely human.

In the meantime, please do catch this essay by sane liberal Joe "Primary Colors" Klein over at Time. Klein, though still very much the anti-Bush partisan, is also an honest enough reporter to recognize a good legal and political argument when he sees it. An excerpt:

For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are "fruit," and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality—spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders.

Henry Kissinger even wiretapped his own aides. But the "all fruit" assumption doesn't take into account the strict constraints placed on the intelligence community after the Nixon debacle, or the lethally elusive nature of the current terrorist threat. The liberal reaction is also an understandable consequence of the Bush Administration's tendency to play fast and loose on issues of war and peace—rushing to war after overhyping the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program, appearing to tolerate torture, keeping secret prisons in foreign countries and denying prisoners basic rights. At the very least, the Administration should have acted, with alacrity, to update the federal intelligence laws to include the powerful new technologies developed by the NSA.

But these concerns pale before the importance of the program. It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.

Klein is clearly correct in spotting the scandal. Had the NSA not used its technology to intercept suspected Al-Qaeda communications directed into the United States, it is that failure that would have been the impeachable offense.

See you all again soon! (I hope...)