On Gen. Hayden's National Press Club Speech :: War on Terror

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January 25, 2006

On Gen. Hayden's National Press Club Speech

Although I've previously posted on General Hayden's speech to the National Press Club, California Conservative has some excellent commentary on the speech, and it's worth drawing attention to.

As he points out, Tom and John at RealClearPolitics have posted the transcript of Gen. Michael Hayden's speech to the National Press Club, but CC has read the entire speech and gleened much new information. Here's some of the most informative information that he found:

...we also turned on the spigot of NSA reporting to FBI in, frankly, an unprecedented way. We found that we were giving them too much data in too raw form. We recognized it almost immediately, a question of weeks, and we made all of the appropriate adjustments. Now, this flow of data to the FBI has also become part of the current background noise, and despite reports in the press of thousands of tips a month, our reporting has not even approached that kind of pace. You know, I actually find this a little odd. After all the findings of the 9/11 commission and other bodies about the failure to share intelligence, I'm up here feeling like I have to explain pushing data to those who might be able to use it. And of course, it's the nature of intelligence that many tips lead nowhere, but you have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.

In other words, the reports of thousands upon thousands of American citizens having their conversations wiretapped is - baloney.

CC also found it odd that some of the people who were upset that we didn't connect the dots before 9/11, are now the ones who are saying that we can't uncover the dots, at least without running through a maze of bureaucratic red tape.

In case those critics hadn't noticed, the enemy doesn't have to play by those rules. So how do these critics expect the NSA to protect us from these terrorists? CC draws attention to one of the important fact that - "One end of any call targeted under this program is always outside the United States." So, if you are not a terrorist and you are not talking to a terrorist, who is outside the United States of America, you have nothing to worry about. If you are, the President and most Americans damned well want you monitored.

Read much more on this at CC ...

For the benefit of our moonbat, Kool-Aid drinking, ostrich-imitating friends of the Left : "Al Qaeda is an international terrorist network. We cannot defeat it by conquering territory. It has none. We cannot round up its citizens. Its allegiance is to an ideology that makes nationality irrelevant. To defeat it and defend ourselves, we can only acquire intelligence -- intercept its communications and thwart its plans. Nothing else will do.

As an example of the Left's agenda in the media: In RJ Eskow's, "Heads Up: Bush Is Winning the NSA 'Headline War,'" we see how journalists of the Left portray an opinion as disclosing a fallacy of the NSA argument and "misleading headlines" that support it, yet themselves craft their piece to purposefully misconstrue truths to support their own Left-wing agenda that perverts our nation's ability to defend itself.

Although Eskow's intention is to say otherwise, his own words describe what has become the view of the Democratic party in the minds of most Americans: The GOP has the reputation as the "manly, defend-America -at-all-costs party" and the Democrats as the "wring-your-hands-over-the-rights-of-terrorists" party.

Posted by Richard at January 25, 2006 8:41 AM

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