On Thursday, February 2, the heads of this nations intelligence agencies testified under oath to Congress that the new media, specifically the Washington Post and New York Times, had damaged our intelligence gathering capabilities. And therefore put us all at higher risk for a successful terrorist attack.

CIA Director Porter J. Goss told a Senate committee yesterday that unauthorized leaks of classified information about agency activities have caused “severe damage” to the CIA’s operations and that journalists who report leaks should be questioned by a grand jury.
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Goss, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that “the damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission.” He added: “It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information. I believe the safety of this nation and the people of this country deserves nothing less.”

The odds are already stacked against us. The terrorists only need to be lucky once to get through our defenses. We have to be right all the time. And Pulitzer crazed liberal journalists have decided to risk our lives to feather their careers.

Not surprisingly, the Washington Post omits key testimony that furthers the conclusion their rampant hate of Bush has crossed professional and responible lines. Somehow the testimony on the damage was limited to Porter Goss and the CIA – not the NSA terrorist surveillance program. You have to go outside DC to get the real story

U.S. intelligence officials told Congress on Thursday that disclosure of once-classified projects like President Bush’s no-warrant eavesdropping program have undermined their work.
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Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence and a former NSA director, said it was hard to characterize any damage done to his agency in an open session.

But, he said, “Some people claim that somehow or another our capabilities are immune to this kind of information going out into the public domain.”

“And, I can tell you, in a broad sense, that is certainly not true.”

So much damage, so much help to Al Qaeda. And were the Democrats concerned some of our most critical monitoring efforts on Al Qaeda were compromised:

Committee Democrats sought to change the focus to the president’s decision to authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop — without first obtaining warrants — on communications to and from those in the United States and terror suspects abroad.

No. They were obsessed with political hits on a President trying to stop more killing of US citizens. To get an idea of what we lost you only need to look at what was possible only a few short years ago – thanks to a clumsy and uninformed Al Qaeda network.

Some 10 years ago, the NSA did pick up phone conversations that linked Al Qaeda with numerous operations, wrote independent historian Matthew Aid in a 2003 journal article on signals intelligence and the terror fight.

Through much of its history, including bin Laden’s time in Sudan, Al Qaeda operatives maintained poor communications security, he wrote. “The public record shows that [between 1993 and 2003] bin Laden and his operatives broke virtually every basic tenet of good spying tradecraft, the most important commandment of which was and remains never to speak about one’s operations using communications means that can be intercepted.”

Now, thanks to the New York Times they know better and have adjusted their operations. We had chances, but we missed them prior to 9-11

In all likelihood in the mid-1990s the National Security Agency was listening to the communications traffic flowing through the Umm Haraz satellite ground station outside Khartoum, Sudan.

The reason: Osama bin Laden then lived nearby. According to an expert on the history of US eavesdropping, the NSA had identified the phone numbers used by Mr. bin Laden and key associates. Intercepts yielded a trove of data about the financing and organization of the fledgling Al Qaeda.

Back then it was a naive and delusional national mindset of complacency. Today, we have a political left willing to do anything to win an election. Anything.

What I predicted is turning out to be the case. The NSA has always snagged conversations with people in the US when monitoring overseas targets or calls. How could they not? What has happened, historically, is they threw the information about the US side of the communication away. From the article above

“The NSA has been routinely listening to US persons all along. What they have not done in the past is create a record on US persons,” says Mr. Pike.

What did Bush do after 9-11? He directed the NSA to pass leads on to the FBI regarding the US side of international terrorist communication. That was the change after 9-11. NSA did not change what they were doing. The FBI then investigates the lead – and if it looks like a terrorist partner they go to FISA and make that person a target of a warranted surveillance so they can track ALL THEIR CALLS – not just the international ones.

So the Democrats are not telling NSA to get warrants. If they succeed in shutting down this program, they are going to simply stop the flow of leads to the FBI. So the nect Midhar and Hazmi can be sitting in San Diego preparing their attacks and no one in the US will know about it.