Go Back to Israel, Jane Harmon

[Moses]

It is well known in Washington that Jane Harmon is an operant on behalf of Israel, first and foremost. The extent to which the US is in the grip of an elite that has hijacked the US to pursue their treasonous allegiance to Israel, is demonstrated by the fact that Jane Harmon was selected by the Democrats for of all things the Intelligence Committee, and is the ranking Democrat on that Committee. She was a member of the "gang" that was briefed on the secret, massive surveillance of Americans, and she IS a fascist. The Democrats have allowed her to speak for the Party on intelligence matters, and she is always selected by the media propaganda orchestrators to do so. Today she and Tom Daschel, (an utter AIPAC sleeper still in Washington and influencing the failed, Petain Party "strategy") declared that they think that the illegal Bush program of massive spying on the US should continue. TREASON! And heir Jane says the NY Times should be prosecuted for its publication of whistle blowers information about the illegal program. At the same time, the Repubicans declare, while threatening prosecution, that anyone who knew of the program and thought it was illegal should have spoken out.

This traitor, this known Israeli operative, should be immediately removed from the Intelligence Committee, and all committees that have anything to do with secrets and policy affecting US foreign policy, free speech, intelligence, or military.

Reprinted from NewsMax.com


Sunday, Feb. 12, 2006 12:26 p.m. EST

Jane Harman: NY Times Should be Prosecuted


In a stunning break with her party, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that the New York Times should be prosecuted for damaging national security by revealing the National Security Agency's top secret terrorist surveillance program authorized by President Bush.

"If the press was part of the process of delivering classified information, there have to be some limits on press immunity," Rep. Jane Harman told NBC's "Meet the Press."

Moderator Tim Russert then pressed: "But if [the NSA leak] came from a whistleblower, should the New York Times reporter be prosecuted?"

Harman countered: "Well, it's not clear it was a whistleblower. You have to prove that first."

"If it's protected by the whistleblower statute, then it's protected," she explained. Harman then added, however, that CIA Director Porter Goss recently said that the Times' sources don't qualify under the whistleblower statute.

"By the way, I deplore that leak," Harman declared moments before her comments on prosecuting the Times. "This is a very valuable foreign [intelligence] collection program. I think it is tragic that a lot of our capabilities are now [spread] across the pages of the newspapers."

In hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy praised the Times leak, saying it revealed an abuse of power by the Bush administration.

!

[Moses]

The Leak Helped Al Qaeda? NONSENSE!

By Larry Johnson | bio

The spin being laid out by the White House and others, that the terrorists got a leg up on us because the New York Times' Jim Risen leaked word that President Bush had authorized illegal domestic surveillance, is sheer, utter bunk.  Deal with the facts people.

FACT 1:  Risen did not reveal how the domestic electronic surveillance was being conducted.  He may know specifically what  they are doing, but he did not and has not disclosed the methodology used.  What was disclosed is that the President was ignoring the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and the FISA court.  What is truly distressing is that the Democrats sat on their hands when they first learned of this program.  I’m not a fan of Republican Senator Pat Roberts, but he has a point.  Why didn't the Democrats speak up then?

Even today, prominent leaders like Jane Harman insist they love the program and could not do anything at the time to signal displeasure.  Only Senator Jay Rockefeller felt compelled to pen a note expressing some discomfort.  The rest of the lot was too d**n scared to speak up.  What good is an opposition party that has no conviction or courage to oppose a violation of the Constitution when they first learn about it?  I think most of the so-called leaders of the Democrats are a bunch of mealy mouthed cowards.  They are more interested in holding onto political office and unwilling to put their careers on the line over a principle as vital as defending the Constitution.

So, was Al Qaeda ignorant of the fact that the United States would be trying to listen in on their conversations?

FACT 2:  Al Qaeda, according to its own training manual, was instructing its members in the early 1990s to be aware that the U.S. intelligence apparatus would try to listen in on their conversations and to take counter measures to avoid detection.  One of these measures was the use of code words to disguise the conversation.  Got it?  They knew we were listening 15 years ago.  Risen's revelations only hurt the President, not the terrorists.

As we debate whether the President can do anything he thinks is necessary to protect the United States-- including ignoring the Constitution-- let us be clear on one fact; Al Qaeda and other terrorists did not learn from Jim Risen or the New York Times that the NSA (and others) were listening in on their various communications.  They already knew that.

What we need to figure out is quite simple.  Is every American, including a war time President, covered by the Constitution?  Our answer to that question will determine if we can really remain a free society, ruled by law rather than strongmen.  

[Moses]

pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/newssummary/s_423380.html

Rep. Jane Harman, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she didn't fully understand the legal underpinnings of the program at the time of the classified briefings [she is an incompetent] and wasn't free to consult with experts. Since it has become public, she has argued that the president broke the law by failing to consult all the members of the intelligence committees, instead of just the leaders. [She believes warrantless surveillance of Americans is absolutely fine, so long as the other Israeli operatives in congress are briefed-]


"Remember, we go into those briefings alone," the California congresswoman said. "We have no ability to consult staff. We have no ability to consult constitutional experts or legal experts on the history of FISA. Since the program has been disclosed, I think all of us, or at least I, have become a lot smarter about all of that."

Hoekstra and Harman appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" with two others who were among the few leading lawmakers to be briefed on the program before it became public -- Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

The two Republicans -- Hoekstra and Roberts -- said Congress does not need to pass further legislation granting specific authority to conduct the eavesdropping because the president already had authority under the resolution authorizing him to take out al-Qaida passed on Sept. 15, 2001.

Both Democrats -- Harman and Daschle -- said they think the program is valuable and should continue, but said the law should be changed to allow it. [Telling that these are the ones Russert invited as "opposition"]

[Moses]

Opinion
Arianna Huffington: Russert Watch: Memories [/size]

Arianna Huffington
Sun Feb 12, 8:16 PM ET




What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget


Today's Meet the Press featured an older male Senator hawking a bottle of pills. And no, these weren't little blue pills, and no, it wasn't Senator Bob Dole. It was another senator from Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), who, I kid you not, tried to make a point about the NSA scandal to his fellow panelists -- former Senator Tom Daschle, Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record) (D-CA), and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record) (R-MI) -- by pulling out a bottle of pills and admonishing the group that "everybody ought to take a memory pill."

And though it was a bizarre moment -- Daschle and the others had the kind of embarrassed smile you get when your crazy old uncle starts yelling at FDR at the dinner table -- it was strangely appropriate.

This past week, I blogged about Tim Robbins' new production of 1984, and about how fear blots out memory. The problem with the rebellious hero, wrote Orwell, was that "his memory was not satisfactorily under control."

So leave it to Senator Pat Roberts to land right on the zeitgeist (which can be painful, though perhaps he has pills for that too).

But while Roberts may have nailed the memory problem, he was not so good on the solution. Because if his own memory is evidence of the powers of his pills, he should demand a memory-pill recall.

Senator Roberts, as you may know, is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, as such, was one of the few legislators briefed by the administration on its warrantless spying program. So you might expect him to get at least the most basic facts about the program right. Especially when he bragged early on in the show that he "knew exactly what was going on."

Then why was he still claiming that the program was just about "phone calls from terror cells"? That's simply false. Of the thousands of calls monitored under the warrantless eavesdropping program, fewer than 10 a year have been suspicious enough even to prompt further investigation.

Roberts was also dead wrong about the time constraints following the FISA law would impose on the President, claiming that it takes "five days... eight days..." to obtain a warrant. Is there anybody who has remotely followed this story who by now doesn't know that the FISA law allows the President to begin a wiretap without a warrant and continue it for 72 hours before asking for a retroactive warrant?

And of course Tim, who lives in the eternal present (going to the past only for meaningless "gotcha" quotes, and the future only for meaningless "Are you running for president?" questions), failed to call Roberts on these outright falsehoods.

So just what, exactly, is in those pills, Senator Roberts? In fact, his arguments throughout the show were so weak, they could have used the extra blood flow from a few of Dole's blue pills. (If your arguments become painfully strong or last more than 4 hours, consult your doctor.)

Just how flaccid were his arguments? Check this one out:

President of the United States the authority to do anything he believes is necessary to protect the country? ROBERTS: Yes, but I wouldn't say anything he believes. I think you go at it very, very carefully.



So as long as you break the law with care, you've got Senator Roberts' okay.

And how were the Democrats? Let me just say that the real success of Karl Rove is not that he has the right-wing noise machine on message, it's that he has so much of the Democratic party establishment on message. Yes, Daschle and Harman expressed concern here, and wrung their hands there, but both of them were so busy vowing their opposition to al Qaeda and their support of "giving the President all the power he needs to fight them" that it's clear they've basically bought into the premise that this is about safety and not, as is actually the case, about the rule of law.

Which brings up a side note I'd like to pass along to Democratic politicians: trying to appear strong by constantly reiterating that you are against the terrorists does not make you look strong. We're all against the terrorists. That's not what this debate is about, though it's what Karl Rove wants it to be about, and you're doing a great job obliging him.

Sorry, back to the show. The real problem with what Jane Harman said on the show is that she appeared to be buying into the administration's conflation of the Plame leak and the NSA leak.

Even though the administration fought the Plame investigation as hard as it could, they're trying to use it to make the point that All Leaking Is Bad Leaking.

But the two cases are mirror images of one another. In one, you have the Vice President authorizing his thuggish chief of staff to leak classified information to buttress the arguments for a disastrous war. The other is a classic whistleblower case that practically defines why whistleblower statutes were enacted in the first place.

There's also been much speculation that there are other programs, or other details of this program, as Glenn Greenwald points out, that aren't yet known:


Our hope for finding out about the existence of other illegality depends upon the willingness of whistle blowers to come forward and journalists to investigate and report such misconduct. That is precisely why the Administration is so aggressively seeking to attack and silence those two groups, and it is why the significance and danger of those attempts really can't be overstated.

And Jane Hamsher shows how Plame prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald himself made a point of emphasizing the need to protect whistleblowers:


In the recently released 2004 affidavit in the CIA leak case, Fitzgerald gives a very good outline of the need to protect true whistleblowers, and how this is actually furthered by prosecuting the smear merchants in the Plame case who disingenuously hoped to hide behind "whistleblower" status... In ignoring this critical distinction and commencing a witch hunt for the purposes of political intimidation and thuggery, the DoJ is twisting the law to partisan purposes.

So instead of fighting to separate these two cases and show how they're different, we have Congresswoman Harman conflating them, and doing the administration's dirty work for them:


RUSSERT: Should members of the press be called in by a grand jury and asked where they got the information? HARMAN: Well, this is getting messier and messier, we just saw this in the Valerie Plame investigation...

And what of Tim? The Russert Schtick of the Day was his typical confusion of the players with the principle. He seemed obsessed with whether or not the Democratic senators and congressmen who were briefed on the illegal program registered their objections at the time. Here's just a sampling of Russert's references to this:


RUSSERT: In those briefings, did anyone raise objections to the plan? ... Were you comfortable with the plan when you were informed of it? ... Is the vice president correct that Democrats went along with this program and then when it went public began to raise reservations? ... Did some members express reservations? ... Did anyone in the congressional branch say, "Is this constitutional? Should we be doing this?" ... Do you regret not having raised more reservations?

That may be fun political fodder for the beltway crowd, but it's not the point. Senators Rockefeller and Daschle were not given the power to sign away our civil liberties. A Get Out of Jail Free card for Bush to break the law isn't theirs to give. In the same way that a near-unanimous vote for a war doesn't make the war any more justifiable.

Likewise, I don't particularly care what the reaction by Rockefeller or Harman or Daschle was to the program. Their silence doesn't make it legal. The question is: what do we do about a President who's breaking the law?

And, sadly, the answer, at least from Daschle and Harman, was this: instead of making him conform his actions to the law, we fix the law so that it conforms to whatever actions he wants to take:


DASCHLE: [We] specifically dealt with the president's request to change FISA. We said, look, if FISA isn't working, what would you have us do? ... HARMAN: We asked the president if he needed more authority.

Unfortunately, Russert and way too many Democrats are already "fixed." And no pills from Pat Roberts -- or Bob Dole -- are going to help.