The New York Times via their clearly biased ill informed reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau have perhaps landed themselves in some hot water.
Commentator Jack Kelly exposes their shoddy reporting and highlights the security issues surrounding their blabbing.
A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaida suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant.
"We’re seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was not the program Risen and Lichtblau wrote about. The scandal is that they wrote about it.
Of course dopey Keith Locke jumped right in and exposed hinself (no pun intended) ayet again as a blithering idiot. Keith if you are reading this pay close attention….President Bush has not broken any laws….the reporters and their sources however have.
Risen and Lichtblau chose not to mention this story, which appeared in the New York Times on Nov. 7th, 1982:
"A federal appeals court has ruled that the National Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe the Americans are foreign agents."
Even the feckless Jimmy Carter issued on May 23rd, 1979, an executive order authorizing the attorney general "to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order."
Carter cited as the authority for issuing his order the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Congress had passed the year before, and which Alter and other hyperventilating hypocrites claim Bush has violated.
Why would Carter think that? Perhaps he read — as evidently Alter hasn’t — section 1802 of the FISA law, which says: "the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order… to acquire foreign intelligence information…"
Whoopsy, big fuck up there. Jack leaves his most scathing comments till the end.
The news media didn’t think warrantless electronic surveillance was a threat to our liberty when Democratic presidents authorized it. National Review’s Byron York, who dug up the Gorelick testimony mentioned above, noted the Washington Post reported on it on Page A-19.
It is despicable, but not illegal, for the news media to publish vital national secrets leaked to them. But the leakers have committed a felony.
Those who have demanded severe punishment for whoever it was who told reporters Valerie Plame worked at the CIA have been remarkably forgiving about who leaked the existence of the NSA intercept program, which — like the earlier leak of secret CIA prisons for al Qaida bigwigs and unlike the Plame kerfuffle — has done serious harm to our national security.
