Which one are you?

[rockysigman]

Also, all those quotes have absolutely nothing to do with the CIA leak. Not one single thing. And for that matter, they barely have anything to do with the Administration's total fuck up in leading our nation into this war. But they have even less to do with the CIA leak.

[chrisfan]

rockysigman said:

Chrisfan, again, I don't understand what Joe Wilson's credibility or outrage has to do with anything. Why does he need credibility on this issue? His public statements are unrelated to what the prosecutors are looking for in their investigations. Why do you care if his outrage is sincere? None of it has anything whatsoever to do with whether or not a serious crime was committed here.

It has to do with the severity of the crime from a political standpoint rather than a criminal one. I've heard all sorts of rhetoric about the leak being treasonous, a threat to our security, etc. A leak can be criminal and not be all of those things. Wilson has been taking the rhetoric up a notch for a while now. If there was any truth behind the rhetoric, then it seems to me that Wilson outing his wife countless times among Washinton circles would be more of a threat to her/our security than anyone in the White House doing so.

[shin]

Lay off the meth, Dee.

[Galactus]

Haha, Shin with the burn!

[Nepenthe]

shin said:

Lay off the meth, Dee.

Only if you promise to abstain from homoerotic fantasies.

[Nepenthe]

11/7/05
By John Leo
The New McGovernites

The editor of "The New Republic" suggested the other day that "the new liberal political culture emerging on the Internet" looks a lot like the McGovernite revolution that descended on the Democratic Party in 1972. In a lecture at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Peter Beinart said the mostly young Internet activists are clearly taking over the party. If so, this would be the first ray of sunshine for conservatives and Republicans in almost a year. The McGovern movement severely damaged the party, pushing it toward four presidential defeats in five tries, until Bill Clinton won by dragging the party back to the center in 1992. If the Internet people had prevailed in 2004, Howard Dean would have won the nomination and then been buried in an enormous landslide, just like George McGovern.

Beinart wrote one of the most impressive magazine articles of 2004, a 6,000-word piece on the failure of liberalism to reshape itself in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of Islamofascism. He was highly critical of liberal "softs" who tolerate Michael Moore and MoveOn.org, the potent Internet-based group that has urged antiwar liberals to cooperate with the totalitarian left, specifically with International Answer, a front for the World Workers Party, which has defended Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and North Korean madman Kim Jong Il. Beinart called on liberals to cut themselves off from totalitarian movements and from people who imagine that the terrorist threat is minor or nonexistent, just as mainstream liberals in 1947 girded themselves for the Cold War by ejecting pro-Communist and soft-on-Communism types like the followers of Henry Wallace.

That article was blunt. The speech last week was more circumspect and polite--no harsh words for the soft-on-totalitarians types like the George Soros-financed activists at MoveOn. Still, Beinart fears that the new activists are "largely in the dark about what they believe" and will come to power without the ideas they need to govern.

Let's assume that Beinart is right and that the Deaniacs are today's McGovernites. This would be an excellent time to ponder what the McGovern reformers did to the party. The changes at the 1972 convention removed the power of the city bosses and party regulars to determine the nominee and, in theory at least, increased the number of Democrats involved in selecting nominees. In reality, though, the reformers, through rule changes and some stealth and manipulation, stacked the convention and radically changed the party. Affluent, well-educated liberals were in--a "new elite," as the Washington Post termed it. Party regulars, officeholders, and blue-collar Democrats were out. New York, a union state, had only three union members as delegates, though it had at least nine members of the gay liberation movement. No farmer was a member of the Iowa delegation. Only 30 of the 255 Democratic members of Congress were selected as delegates. A full 39 percent of delegates had attended graduate school. Over a third of the white delegates were classified as secularists, compared with 5 percent of the general population. The reformers installed rough quotas for blacks, women, Hispanics, and people ages 18 to 25. The total of female delegates tripled, to 43 percent, with heavy emphasis on supporters of abortion and the hard-edged feminism represented by Bella Abzug.

"^A kick in the gut." Jack Newfield and Joe Flaherty, both pro-McGovern Village Voice reporters from working-class backgrounds, asked, Where are the quotas for Irish, Italians, and Poles? "The McGovernite movement," wrote Murray Rothbard, a prominent libertarian, "is, in its very nature, a kick in the gut to Middle America."

The regulars who picked candidates before the McGovern revolution always looked for a mainstream candidate who could win. McGovern's activists had to be mobilized and sustained by ideological appeals that put the movement and the candidate decidedly left of the electorate. So McGovern couldn't have won.

The McGovern reform commission and the people who changed the party in 1972 wrought lasting damage, and not just to Democrats: They helped mightily to create the modern split between red America and blue America. Many members of disfavored groups--Catholics, southerners, and much of the white working class and lower middle class--decamped for the Republican Party, while the Democrats emerged more clearly visible as the party of well-off liberals, the poor, identity and grievance groups, secularists, and the cultural elite. A second coming of McGovernite guerrillas wouldn't do much to improve that image.

[shin]

Hey, if your son wouldn't post pictures of his tiny balls online then maybe it wouldn't be an issue.

[strat-0]

Let's cut to the chase and go straight for the jugular, shall we?

I generaly ignore c/p stuff. Links are better - I'll look at it, if so inclined. Just fwiw.

[kmc]

Well, an article was written. Certainly, then, Joe Wilson is an asshole, Clinton believed Saddam was a threat, and the administration is blameless.

[kmc]

Funny that, I read an article that said just the opposite the other day. Go figure.

[Nepenthe]

admin said:

Let's cut to the chase and go straight for the jugular, shall we?

I generaly ignore c/p stuff. Links are better - I'll look at it, if so inclined. Just fwiw.

That article was from US News, I was reading it when I was at the doctor yesterday. Found it pretty interesting and decided to post it. I have seen several people post articles on here, thought it was pretty much the norm......

Damn, I must be pretty far behind on my INTERNET lingo....I had to sit and think what your net acronym meant.

[Nepenthe]

kmc said:

Funny that, I read an article that said just the opposite the other day. Go figure.

Yes it is kind of funny how much the "new left" and the "far right" have in common....

There isn't much difference between communism and fascism.

[kmc]

I agree, not that much difference in their real world application.

Speaking of: I am currently reading Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here". Amazingly prescient book, written as a dark satire during the Great Depression, only reading it today it isn't so funny. I highly recommend it as a decent guide to some of the lefty misgivings against Bush & Co.

[Nepenthe]

Well hell if we had FDR in charge now I can only imagine what would happen to Joe Wilson......

[Nepenthe]

Kind of an old article from 2003 but pretty interesting. Can't remember if I ever put this up before here or not....

October 01, 2003, 8:43 a.m.
A Brief History of Classified Leaks
No public official has leaked a CIA employee’s identity since...oh, 1995 or so.

The Joe Wilson brouhaha has been front-page news in the Washington Post for three days, the top story on the cable talking-heads shows, network news, and now the subject of a partisan rhetorical showdown on the Senate floor. Obviously, this bizarre circumstance, in which a prominent Washington official is alleged to have leaked the identity of a CIA employee and endangered intelligence sources, is unprecedented and unparalleled, right?


Well, not exactly.

In 1995, then-Rep. Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, was told by a State Department employee that a paid CIA informant, Guatemalan Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, was involved in the killing of the husband of an American citizen.

Then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Torricelli complained the CIA was doing nothing to uncover the facts of the case for the widow, Jennifer Harbury.

Of course, Alpirez's identity and ties to the CIA were classified; Torricelli revealed them anyway. In March 1995, Torricelli listed Alpirez's name and his connection to the CIA in a letter to President Clinton and gave a copy of the letter to the New York Times.

The House of Representatives's ethics committee ruled several months later that Torricelli acted "contrary" to a House rule when he disclosed the classified information. But the panel said it would not punish Torricelli because of "ambiguity" in the rule.

Eventually, the House passed a rule creating a secrecy oath that must be signed by any member or staffer trying to gain access to classified information. Under the new rules, revealing information the way Torricelli did is forbidden.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report concluding that "none of the allegations" originally raised by Torricelli were true. Committee Democrats, however, said in a minority rebuttal that "this categorical assertion is not supported by the evidence."

However, the Democrats did not dispute the part of the report that ripped Torricelli for publicly revealing the information. While there's still debate as to whether publicizing the CIA employment of Joe Wilson's wife will damage U.S. intelligence gathering, the impact of Torricelli's leak was clear, according to the Intelligence Committee review:

"The CIA has given the Committee evidence that the disclosures concerning Guatemala have resulted in the loss of some contacts around the world, who feared their relationship with the United States would be disclosed as well," the report said.

The State Department aide who gave the information to Torricelli, Richard Nuccio, was stripped of his security clearance by then-CIA Director John Deutch.

The intelligence report also offered a mild rebuke of Nuccio. The report noted that a separate investigation by the State Department Inspector General found that besides passing the information to Torricelli, Nuccio "may have also provided classified information to members of the press, and had prepared classified documents on his home computer that he then telecopied over unsecure telephone lines."

What were the consequences to Nuccio? Well, the leak controversy and the loss of his security clearance ended his career in the executive branch, and he resigned from the State Department. But it turned out he made the right friends on Capitol Hill. From March 1997 until January 1998 he was senior foreign-policy adviser to Torricelli. During 1998 and 1999, Dr. Nuccio was an adviser to Fernando Zumbado, director of the United Nations Development Program's Latin American and Caribbean bureau; served as a consultant to the RAND Corporation, and to the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO). In April 2000, he was named founding director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University.

Recalling the messy Torricelli-Nuccio-Alpirez affair, security-minded Americans can at least take solace that then-CIA director John Deutch was on the ball when it comes to protecting classified information, right?

Wrong again! George Tenet, Deutch's successor as CIA director, announced in August 1999 that he had stripped Deutch of his CIA security clearance as a penalty for keeping classified documents on ordinary home computers that were not protected by locks, encryption or other security devices.

In fact, until February 2000, Deutch still had a Pentagon security clearance that allowed him to work as a paid consultant on classified Defense Department contracts with Raytheon Corp., SAIC Corp. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thankfully, the taxpayers have Congress to investigate these leaks, because in the post-9/11 era, the legislative branch has a preeminent duty to oversee intelligence agencies and make sure sensitive information doesn't get leaked... when they're not leaking that information themselves.

The day of the 9/11 attacks, Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, told the Associated Press that intelligence agencies "have an intercept of some information that includes people associated with [Osama] bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit."

He made similar comments to ABC News and said the information had come from officials at the CIA and FBI. White House officials were more than mildly displeased with the Hatch at the time.

"Well, that helps a lot! [Expletive]!" one administration official told the Chicago Tribune.

In November 2001, President Bush accused unnamed lawmakers of leaking secrets last week to the news media. For one day, he ordered that briefings involving sensitive information to be limited to only eight top members of Congress, before changing his mind the following day.

Bush's outrage was stirred by a Washington Post report on a classified briefing. In that story, intelligence officials reportedly told lawmakers there was a "100 percent likelihood of further terrorist strikes." According to some senators, there was much more sensitive information leaked to the Post that they decided not to run.

Then, in summer 2002, the leaders of the Senate and House intelligence panels called in the FBI to investigate after Vice President Dick Cheney complained to them about another leak.

National Security Agency director, Lt. General Michael Hayden, testified to a joint House-Senate panel about highly classified radio intercepts of two messages that hinted at impending action by al Qaeda terrorists shortly before Sept. 11. The messages, originally in Arabic, were not translated until after the attacks occurred. One day after Hayden's appearance before the joint panel, CNN aired a report on his testimony.

The FBI investigation did not result in any arrests.

And in what has to rank as one of the most damaging leaks of all time, press leaks tipped off Osama bin Laden to the NSA's interceptions of his satellite phone conversations. He then switched to more sophisticated phone systems, according to intelligence officials.

So what's the impact of all these leaks? Isn't it just an inside-Washington game of puffery and ego stroking? Will a reference on page A17 of the Post make a difference in the war on terror?

Yes, it will, according to the CIA. On June 14 of last year, the agency circulated a memo to top government officials warning them against leaks that it says have "jeopardized" U.S. intelligence capabilities.

"Information obtained from captured detainees has revealed that al Qaeda operatives are extremely security-conscious and have altered their practices in response to what they have learned from the press about our capabilities," the memo stated. "A growing body of reporting indicates that al Qaeda planners have learned much about our counter-terrorist intelligence capabilities from U.S. and foreign media."

The memo also stated that every public disclosure of classified information erodes trust in U.S. intelligence and "reduce the willingness of potential allies, volunteers and sources in foreign countries to work with us out of fear of having their cooperation publicized in the press."

Today, taxpayers must be reassured to see members of Congress and the media acting so vigilantly about this most recent leak. As the central figure of the controversy, Joe Wilson put it, "At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

Oddly, previous leakers of classified information like Torricelli, Nuccio, Deutch, and Hatch have not been seen "frog-marching in handcuffs."