Joe Klein, former anonymous Clinton chronicler and now of Time Magazine, writes that Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to the head of NSA on Oct. 11, 2001 (a month, obviously, after 9/11), complaining that the NSA was acting without authority in its efforts to monitor Al-Queda activities in the U.S. (This was before, again obviously, the Democrats began complaining that the Bush administration had not done or been doing enough to track Al-Queda operatives in the U.S.).
According to Klein,
The release of Pelosi’s letter last week and the subsequent Times story (“Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show”) left the misleading impression that a) Hayden [then head of the NSA] had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn’t exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, “Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it’s all fruit.”
A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are “fruit,” and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality — spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders.
It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish Democratic leaders from the ACLU. Most Democrats probably regard this as a good thing. There was a time when I would have regarded it as a good thing.
