NO PRESS, NO CONGRESS--THEN WHO?!?

Hayden's rant yesterday on the evil media imposing oversight was disturbing. Here he was talking to an impotent Congress--the body refusing to act as a check on an aggressive executive branch--while simultaneously attacking the press for revealing the existence of the NSA programs, secret CIA prisons--all illegal--trying to appeal to our fears about terrorism. Congress is Hayden's bitch, and the press is next on his bitch list.

Admittedly, I'm no intelligence expert. However, I strongly suspect that the details revealed by the press in all of these stories do not in any way compromise our security. If they do, then we're fighting the stupidest terrorist ever known to man. And even if these leaks do hurt us, I'm willing to take the risk for the sake of keeping watch on a government that has a tendency to break the law and our basic values of governance. If you don't want "leaks", then DON’T BREAK THE LAW. It's that simple! Do what's legal and whistleblowers don't have protections, so you'll eliminate leaks.

Look they're not really interested in stopping these leaks for the sake of security. They're merely interested in shifting focus away from their illegal actions, relying on our propensity for being overly fearful of the threat of terrorism.

Hayden says that without the leaking we will have accountability. Are we to believe that this administration is going to monitor itself? What if we disagree with the criteria the Bush administration has set as premises for action? If we don't have oversight from an independent body, then we are not only stuck with trusting an extraordinarily secret administration to hold itself accountable, but we have no say in how the criteria are set. Bush believes that a president at war can do what he wants. He's the Decider--nobody else. If that's the premise he uses for judging accountability, then his determination will always be different than mine. That Hayden's lawyers told him the programs were legal while he was at the NSA is missing the point. That doesn't preclude the need for oversight because oversight allows us to give our intelligence officials something extra to think about: their logic will be evaluated by an independent body, so it had better be legally sound, nothing less than necessary, and palatable. If there was oversight to begin with, these programs wouldn't have been started because oversight would have affected the logic of the NSA decision makers. Actually, considering we have a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its powers, maybe it wouldn’t have helped—but you get the idea.

I disagree with Hayden. We need the press now more than ever. We need oversight now more than ever. He's proposing we have neither when it comes to intelligence activities. I don't care what war we're fighting or even if sharing information between branches hurts us in that war (and I believe it doesn't…and please don’t give me an crap about having briefed a handful congress members. That’s just not good enough). Oversight is more important than a level secrecy that is unnecessary and harmful to our system of government. This is the lecture he should have had from every member of Congress yesterday--Democrat or Republican--after he vomited his bullshit on them.