The New York Times is a political operation disguised as a newspaper, and the primary objective of its reporting is to damage the Bush administration. Once this axiom is understood, then the Times's "news" coverage makes sense. This hatred of the Bush administration extends to impairing national security, which is why the Times leaked information about NSA surveillance. However, while the Times staff harangues the government from the comfort of West 42nd Street, prominent liberals (who are knowledgable, unlike the Times editors) concur with the administation's national security posture. Here is a former Carter administration official who advised on telecommunications policy.

I believe the New York Times missed the real story under its Dec. 16 headline "Bush lets U.S. spy on callers without courts."...

The president has the ultimate responsibility for Americans' security. His executive order, as reported by the New York Times, is a reasonable assistance to our intelligence agencies.

If we want the CIA, NSA and FBI to "find the dots," they must be freed to work as a lighting-fast team.

And here is a former Clinton administration official from the Justice department.

President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents...

In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."

The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 did not alter the constitutional situation...

Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that "the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

And we already noted Cass Sunstein's opinion on the matter.

if you put the Constitutional authority together with the statutory authorization, the president's on pretty good ground...

It would be unfortunate if the Congress of the United States stopped the president from doing something which Congress already probably is best understood to have allowed the president to do in the authorization to use force.

Those are the legal opinions from Democrats. How about the moral or political thoughts of some of the reasonable Democrats? Take Ed Koch.

The Times has every right to disagree with the President’s action in dispensing with the court set up for this purpose. But it harms the country when it treats the President unfairly with the language and contemptuous tone it now regularly employs.

We already noted how Ted Kennedy, was either lazy, ignorant or a liar (or a combination) when he seized on the Times's latest manufactured controversy to attack President Bush. Some Democrats have followed suit (the usual unhinged suspects), but others have moderated their comments, probably suspecting that Americans would rather know their government is protecting their right to live than a terrorist's non-right to privacy.

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» Report: NSA spying broader than Bush acknowledged from Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator
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» Bush Bypassed FISA Courts Due To Challenges? from Say Anything
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Tracked on December 27, 2005 10:39 PM

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