LAT Selectively Cites Joint Inquiry

The LAT had an article yesterday quoting anonymous senior counter terrorism officials that

"a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines."[emphasis mine]

The bold sentence above in the LAT piece is simply not true, or at best misleading. In the Joint Inquiry, a systemic finding 12 reads as follows:

Finding 12: In the summer of 2001, when the Intelligence Community was bracing for an imminent Al-Qa’ida attack, difficulties with FBI applications for Foreign Intelligence Act surveillance and the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected Al-Qa’ida representatives in the United States. The effect of these difficulties was compounded by the perception that spread among FBI personnel at Headquarters and the field offices that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril. [xvii]

So the LAT is dowdifying the
REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF 9/11 by the House Permanent Select and Senate Select Intelligence Committees by cherry-picking the parts that the paper believes will support its case that Bush had no reasons to circumvent the clunky FISA process that the FBI considered "lengthy and fraught with peril." [xvii]

The anonymous "senior counterterrorism official" made his accusations, and then scurried into his bolt-hole:

Like other current and former officials, the senior counter-terrorism official would only speak on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the intercepts and the controversy that has engulfed the secret program since its disclosure last week.

The LAT piece also says

NSA officials declined to comment Tuesday; a spokeswoman for Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden — the former NSA chief who now is the No. 2 official in the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence — said she could not discuss the issue.

This week, Hayden said that the program to eavesdrop without obtaining FISA warrants was necessary to respond to fast-moving terrorist threats, and that getting a FISA warrant was inefficient and slow.

The LAT indulges in its normal flimflammery, first quoting anonymous sources who make accusations, often using classified material and therefore breaking the law.

Then the LAT ostentatiously cites close-mouthed NSA and DNI spokespeople who do follow the law and do not comment on the leaked materials.

At least General Hayden and John McLaughlin, recently acting DCI, have supported President Bush in defending American national security.

National security does not seem to be a high priority for the process-freaks in the judiciary, press, and Democratic Party, who hyperventilate about civil liberties while no evidence has emerged that Nixon-style wiretaps and eavesdropping for political reasons has occurred.

Another media tempest exalting process over real security concerns.

A media tempest which Newsweek rabble rouser Howard Fineman opines

"will dominate and define the year 2006 — and, I predict, make it the angriest, most divisive season of political theater since the days of Richard Nixon."

Fineman's wish, of course, is father to his thought, and like his angry hard-left Newsweek colleague Jonathan Alter, is plumping for more wholesale political donnybrooks where:

We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security.

Irresponsible journalistic hacks like Alter and Fineman would prefer a civil war to domestic tranquility if it would boost their readership and TV profiles.