Bush hatred endangers national security

By MORTON KONDRACKE

Enough already! It's harmful enough that ideological conflict and partisan politics are preventing this country from solving its long-term challenges on health care, fiscal policy and energy. Now it's threatening our national survival.

I do not exaggerate. Bush-hatred has reached such intensity that CIA officers and other bureaucrats are leaking major secrets about anti-terrorism policy and communications intelligence that undermine our ability to fight Islamic extremism.

Would newspapers in the midst of World War II have printed the fact that the United States had broken German and Japanese codes? Or revealed how and where Nazi spies were being interrogated? Nowadays, newspapers win Pulitzer Prizes for such disclosures.

In Congress and in much of the media, the immediate reaction to news that the National Security Agency was intercepting international terrorist communications was not to say, "Good work -- and how can we help?" Rather, it was to scream about a "domestic spying" scandal..

In fact, what seems to be happening, though the details are secret, is that most long-distance phone companies have given the NSA their billing records identifying what numbers are calling what other numbers, when and for how long. Names are not included. The NSA is using the records to track terrorist networks and calling patterns. If a known terrorist in Pakistan calls a number in Los Angeles, I want the government to know what numbers that person calls. Don't you?

Certainly, the government will find out the names of people in a terrorist calling chain. If it wants to tap a domestic phone, it needs a warrant and, unless officials are lying through their teeth, it is asking for them.

The NSA call logs also apparently are being mined to establish patterns of terrorist-related communication -- the use of pay phones, duration of calls, times of communication, etc.

All this scarcely constitutes "reaching into homes and businesses across the nation."

The phone companies that are cooperating with the government ought to be congratulated for participating in the war on terrorism -- as they would have been during WW II. Instead, they are being hauled before the Senate Judiciary Committee as though they were criminals.

The fundamental problem infecting much of Congress, the media and the political class is that they are consumed with loathing for President Bush and all his works and are prepared to do anything to undermine him, even if it makes the country less safe.

Yes, Republicans tried to destroy former President Bill Clinton over sex and politics. But now Democrats want to destroy Bush so badly that they are willing to undercut national security.

Everyone in Congress should see the movie "United 93" as a reminder of what we are up against. Muslim fanatics will not only try to destroy the Capitol, but also explode a nuclear bomb, if they can.

People also should heed the warning delivered by Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis, one of the nation's foremost scholars of Islam, before the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life last month. Lewis, now 90, cast the struggle with Islamic extremism in WW II terms -- it is 1938, he said, and "we seem to be more in the mode of Chamberlain at Munich rather than of Churchill."

Osama bin Laden and others, he said, consider the United States "an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance." It's part of the pattern that we fight among ourselves as much as against our enemies. This is more than serious. It's dire.

(Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009