The liberals who attempted to make a political conspiracy out of exposing our national security defenses, specifically the NSA’s monitoring of known terrorists overseas and their communications with their contacts here in the US, are still desparetely trying to spin a conspiracy out of thin air. But as they continue to grasp at straws and try and make common sense adjustments look like evil partisan law breaking on the US (instead of what they are: discovering planned attacks by terrorist) they are proving me right on the essence of what I said about the pre and post 9-11 situation with intelligence.

My claim has been that prior to 9-11 the NSA and other intelligence outfits had to DESTROY evidence of terrorists communicating with someone in America (who can be either Americans or people here legally). My claim was that the thing Bush changed after 9-11 was not to bypass FISA, but to change FISA to recognize leads generated by our intelligence groups AS WELL AS leads generated by the FBI. And the essence of this was to pass leads from intelligence groups like the NSA to the FBI for investigation (prior to 9-11 only the FBI could INITIATE such an investigation using group lke the NSA, and only after they recieved a FIS Court warrant). The leads we had about Atta and company prior to 9-11 were naively and negligentally thrown away. That is what I have said is the essence of the NSA story, and now we have a leftwing group with another partisan whistle blower comning out AND PROVING JUST WHAT I STATED!

A former member of U.S. military intelligence has decided to reveal what she knows about warrantless spying on Americans and about the fixing of intelligence in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq.

Adrienne Kinne describes an incident just prior to the invasion of Iraq in which a fax came into her office at Fort Gordon in Georgia that purported to provide information on the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The fax came from the Iraqi National Congress, a group opposed to Saddam Hussein and favoring an invasion. The fax contained types of information that required that it be translated and transmitted to President Bush within 15 minutes. But Kinne had been eavesdropping on two nongovernmental aid workers driving in Iraq who were panicked and trying to find safety before the bombs dropped. She focused on trying to protect them, and was reprimanded for the delay in translating the fax.

Dereliction of duty is a serious offense. And while the lives of two aid workers is important, information that is NOT TRANSLATED could represent many more lives if it is a warning of some pending attack. That is why these messges need to be translated ASAP, to know what they say. THEN, and only then, can the priority be clear. But all that is a smokescreen for a disgruntled employee who simply did not agree with her orders. Somehow she never understood the law – she is not allowed to disobey orders. But she is so lame she cannot say when the incident happened

Kinne dates this incident to the period just before the official invasion of Iraq or possibly just after. She says that because the US engaged in so much bombing prior to the official invasion, she cannot recall for sure.

Like I said, lame. But let’s get back to how she confirmed my statements about the NSA and FISA:

Prior to September 11, 2001, Kinne says, it was unacceptable to listen in on or collect information on Americans. The practice was barred by United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18. Kinne recalls an incident in 1997 in which an American’s name was mentioned, and she and her colleagues deleted every related record because they took very seriously the ban on collecting information on Americans.

Step back and think about this for a moment. Let’s assume, just as an example, the person who mentioned the “American” (and recall legal aliens are included in the same grouping for legal purposes) was Bin Laden or Zawhiri? And let’s assume they were discussing their man in America who was setting up things for 9-11. And let’s assume that man was a Pakistani national who had become an American citizen legally. What Kinne is admitting (and I have been saying) is EVERYTHING about that lead would have been destroyed because it could not be used in A COURT OF LAW! But it could have been used to stop an attack, and act of war like 9-11. Even the head FISA judge AT THE TIME of this 1997 incident agrees Presidents have the power to use intel to defend this nation against acts of war.

Kinne says that post-9-11 she and others routinely collected information on people even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. A common rationale was that the phones of such organizations could conceivably be seized by terrorists.

Note that these phones are now overseas and easily the purview of the NSA. If the phone is calling another US number then the NSA does what it does today – destroys the intel. But if the phone calls an international number, it is monitored to make sure it is not being used to plan attacks. Welcome to the modern world, where communication, the foundation of any planned attack, is so ubiquitous that the end points cannot be conveyed special privilege until it is determined WHO is communicating. But it gets better:

Shortly after this incident, however, in mid-2002, they were given a waiver to spy on Americans. This waiver was communicated to Kinne and her colleagues orally, and she assumed that it had come from the President or someone very high up.

In other words she has no evidence of this ‘order’ – even though we KNOW the FIS Court, at this point, was processing NSA leads. From here on the story becomes quite extravagant and completey unprovable. But we learn all we need to know about Kinne:

And early this year she joined a tour of Vermont with activists Cindy Sheehan, John Nichols, Dan DeWalt, and veterans of the war, a tour promoting the passage of impeachment resolutions in Vermont towns, a tour that helped effect the passage of those resolutions in over 40 towns up and down the state.

The fact is the NSA can spy on foreign journalists in a Baghdad hotel. And terrorists can pretend to be jounralist. So we have a lot of nothing except complete confirmation by the lunatic left that (a) we would throw away leads regarding pending terrorist attacks being coordinate in and possibly aimed at America and (b) they are more than willing to not only give terrorist their cover back again, by doing this in the news they will be letting them know when it will be safe again to use the American phones to plan the next 9-11. These ideologues are so obsessed they are risking the lives of thousands of Americans. That should be a crime, and in fact I think it is.

And again Joe Lieberman shows why being partisan a dangerous waste of time when it comes to national security. He correctly notes that the thwarted attacks in London remind us why we need to monitor our enemies and any agents they may have here in the US. And the liberals play al-Qaeda’s useful idiots by pretending these Americans or peopple in America talking to KNOWN terrorists deserve some kind of extra constitutional protections as they plot killing our people.