Seeker Blog

Gen. Hayden’s Press Club address makes it abundantly clear how important is the NSA intercept program, and how much damage has been done by the NYT mob. The full text is a 21 page PDF, which includes Q&A at the end of the Press Club briefing.

Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just — I can’t see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation. And I know people say, “Oh, they know they’re being monitored.” Well, you know, they don’t always act like they know they’re being monitored. But if you want to shove it in their face constantly, it’s bound to have an impact. And so to — I understand…there are issues here that the American people are deeply concerned with. But constant revelations and speculation and connecting the dots in ways that I find unimaginable, and laying that out there for our enemy to see cannot help but diminish our ability to detect and prevent attacks.

The press questions are largely inane [uninformed, to be polite] and typically hostile, e.g., “congressional powers of the president” (??)

QUESTION: You cited before the congressional powers of the president.

Are you — are you asserting inherent so-called constitutional powers that a — to use the term that came up in the Alito hearings — “a unitary executive” has to violate the law when he deems fit?

UPDATE: Paul Mirengoff’s comments on 24 January were very much on target:

It is worth considering why no real inquiry regarding the program occurred when the administration first advised congressional leaders about it. The reason, I think, is that few adults in their right mind would want to encumber the government’s right to listen to al Qaeda’s conversations with people in the U.S., and only a politician suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome would want to make the government’s right to do so a political issue.

Why did the landscape change when the New York Times reported the program? Because at that point the matter was out of the hands of politicians who are both “adult” and not politically deranged. The clamor resulting from the combination of MSM denizens and lefty bloggers invoking the specter of King George III, embittered blowhard politicians, and old bull Senators obsessed with their prerogatives meant that hearings would have to occur.

But the hearing that matters is already occuring in the form of presentations like General Hayden’s, Attorney General Gonzalez’s, and President Bush’s. And the public’s take is the same as that of the Democrats whom the administration briefed at the inception of the program — few adults in their right mind would want to encumber the government’s right to listen to al Qaeda’s conversations with people in the U.S.

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