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September 26, 2005

More voices want Able Danger witnesses ungagged

Here are some editorials, all asking the Pentagon to let them testify.

Muzzling pre-9/11? - The Journal News, NY

Able Danger and total awareness - Daniel Gallington in the Washington Times, DC

Able Danger: Pentagon should reveal details of pre-9/11 program - Salt Lake Tribune, UT

Force Pentagon to provide data - Scranton Times, PA

The Suicide Ethos - Andrew McCarthy in National Review

Here is a quote from McCarthy, who is right on target:

In the Information Era, the world is increasingly small. Thus, in the course of carrying out those missions, it frequently happens that DoD intelligence services will incidentally capture information about U.S. persons. Does that mean these services need to shed that information, even if it could be vital to our safety?

Of course not. The whole point of the governing regulations is to allow the military to keep intelligence that might save American lives. Thus, Dugan conceded that the rules set forth 13 broad reasons for retaining information about U.S. persons....

There are few of these categories that would not provide, by themselves, a justification to maintain intelligence gathered on U.S. persons in the course of tracking an international terrorist organization and its members who were in the process of plotting to mass murder American civilians and military personnel. And that's leaving aside that the information we are talking about was, for the most part, actually gathered from publicly available information (a justifying category unto itself — see, No.2, above)

Dugan went on to note that "[w]e place special emphasis on the protection of information on United States persons. Our second area of emphasis is on ensuring improper activity by intelligence personnel is identified, reported, investigated, and then action taken to keep it from happening again."

The culture, the message to our forces, could not be more patent: protecting American lives is secondary to not being vexed by the ACLU and its fellow travelers. Even if proving our hearts are pure means gratuitously and utterly unnecessarily expunging goo-gobs of critical intelligence about our enemies in the middle of a war in which we know they are trying to kill us (and, mind you, al Qaeda regarded this as a war long before 9/11, even if our government didn't).

Posted by Mike at September 26, 2005 12:11 PM

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