The Real Joe McCarthy By Ronald Kessler The Wall Street Journal April 22, 2008
Fifty-four years ago today, Sen. Joseph McCarthy started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and communists in the Army. The spectacle grabbed the country's attention for the next two months.
By the end of the McCarthy hearings, the senator’s career was over; before an audience that often numbered 20 million Americans, he came across as bullying and unscrupulous. Yet today, more and more conservative writers are trying to vindicate the late senator. Authors M. Stanton Evans and Ann Coulter, for example, have claimed that McCarthy was more right than wrong because he, along with dozens of other anticommunists, was correct that the government was riddled with spies.
The FBI agents who actually chased Soviet spies have a very different perspective.
Robert J. Lamphere, who participated in all the FBI's major spy cases during the McCarthy period, was one. Lamphere also was the FBI liaison to the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service's Venona program, which was intercepting secret Soviet communications. He used leads from the intercepts to work cases involving notorious espionage figures such as Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Kim Philby.
Lamphere, who died in 2002, told me in an interview that agents who worked counterintelligence were appalled that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially supported McCarthy. True enough, the Venona intercepts revealed that hundreds more Soviet spies had operated in the government than was believed at the time.
"The problem was that McCarthy lied about his information and figures," Lamphere said. "He made charges against people that weren’t true. McCarthyism harmed the counterintelligence effort against the Soviet threat because of the revulsion it caused."
McCarthy’s crusade began on Feb. 9, 1950, when the Republican senator from Wisconsin gave a speech to the local Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia. "While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205–a list of names that were known to the secretary of State and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy of the State Department," he said.
However, the next day in Salt Lake City he told his audience that the number of communists was 57.
After the first speech, Willard Edwards, the author of articles in the Chicago Tribune on the communist threat, urgently asked Walter Trohan, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, to come speak with him in Edwards’s office.
Edwards, according to Trohan, confided that just before the Wheeling speech McCarthy had asked him about the number of communists in the State Department. Edwards gave McCarthy the figure of 205. Now he realized his mistake. "Edwards said it was more or less a rumor," Trohan told me. "It was just a piece of gossip."
Bogus figures or not, McCarthy soon became a national figure. Back in Washington, he told FBI director Hoover that he had "made up the numbers as he talked." Hoover advised him not to give specific numbers in the future. McCarthy asked if the FBI would give him information to back up his charges. "Review the files and get anything you can for him" was Hoover’s order. Result? "We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone 57 cases," said William Sullivan, who became the number three man in the bureau.
The Army-McCarthy hearings followed a pattern, notes Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate. Typically, McCarthy held hearings in executive session first, "like a dress rehearsal," says Mr. Ritchie, who studied the transcripts of the hearings. Mostly McCarthy didn’t have any hard evidence against the people he was interrogating; he just hoped to get them to contradict themselves or to take the Fifth Amendment, or to confess.
"He interviewed about 500 people in closed session," Mr. Ritchie told me. "He called about 300 people to public session. After they’d testified in closed session, he’d go out in the hall, and he’d tell the waiting press what had just happened," Mr. Ritchie says. "We looked at both the New York Times’s and the Chicago Tribune's accounts and then we compared that to what actually went on inside the hearings. What he told the press grossly exaggerated what took place."
As his arrogance grew, McCarthy began accusing President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being soft on communists. Hoover realized the dance was over; just before the Army-McCarthy hearings started he ordered the bureau to cease helping the senator.
During the hearings, McCarthy failed to substantiate his claims that communists had penetrated the Army. He did, however, insinuate that Fred Fischer, a young lawyer at Hale and Dorr, the law firm representing the Army, was a communist sympathizer because he'd been a member of the National Lawyers Guild at Harvard Law School. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg had also been a member of the group, which was alleged to be a communist front.
Upon hearing this accusation, Joseph Welch of Hale and Dorr, responded, "Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or recklessness." When McCarthy continued to hound Fischer, Welch said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
A Senate committee concluded that McCarthy’s behavior as a committee chairman was "inexcusable," and "vulgar and insulting." On Dec. 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure him; on May 2, 1957, McCarthy, age 48, died of acute hepatitis, widely believed to be a result of his alcoholism.
As a top Justice Department attorney, John L. Martin prosecuted scores of spies during a long career, and read many of the FBI's most secret raw files on historic espionage cases, including the files on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Judith Coplon, Alger Hiss and Rudolph Abel. "While Venona later confirmed and expanded upon what the FBI knew about Soviet operations in the U.S.," Mr. Martin says, McCarthy used "the umbrella of national security to justify his outrageous practice of besmirching reputations of loyal Americans."
Efforts to vindicate McCarthy overlook the fact that he did not help the cause of dealing with the spy threat. Rather, he gave spy hunting a bad name. In sanctioning McCarthy’s intimidating tactics and dishonest charges, revisionists dangerously invite history to be repeated.
Mr. Kessler, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter, is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com and the author of "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack" (Crown Forum, 2007).
Obama and His Minister By Ronald Kessler The Wall Street Journal March 14, 2008
In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of Mr. Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave the sermon at the school's Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel in Washington on Jan. 15, 2006.
"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began. "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
Mr. Wright thundered on: "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."
Concluding, Mr. Wright said: "We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."
Considering this view of America, it’s not surprising that in December Mr. Wright’s church gave an award to Louis Farrakhan for lifetime achievement. In the church magazine, Trumpet, Mr. Wright spoke glowingly of the Nation of Islam leader. "His depth on analysis [sic] when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye-opening," Mr. Wright said of Mr. Farrakhan. "He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest."
After Newsmax broke the story of the award to Farrakhan on Jan. 14, Mr. Obama issued a statement. However, Mr. Obama ignored the main point: that his minister and friend had spoken adoringly of Mr. Farrakhan, and that Mr. Wright's church was behind the award to the Nation of Islam leader.
Instead, Mr. Obama said, "I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree." Trumpet is owned and produced by Mr. Wright's church out of the church’s offices, and Mr. Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor.
Meeting with Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Feb. 24, Mr. Obama described Mr. Wright as being like "an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with." He rarely mentions the points of disagreement.
Mr. Obama went on to explain Mr. Wright's anti-Zionist statements as being rooted in his anger over the Jewish state's support for South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. As with his previous claim that his church gave the award to Mr. Farrakhan because of his work with ex-offenders, Mr. Obama appears to have made that up. Neither the presentation of the award nor the Trumpet article about the award mentions ex-offenders, and Mr. Wright's statements denouncing Israel have not been qualified in any way. Mr. Obama nonetheless told the Jewish leaders that the award to Mr. Farrakhan "showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community." That is an understatement.
As for Mr. Wright’s repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks because of what Mr. Wright calls its racist and violent policies, Mr. Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be "provocative."
Hearing Mr. Wright’s venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through numerous similar sermons by Mr. Wright.
Indeed, Mr. Obama has described Mr. Wright as his "sounding board" during the two decades he has known him. Mr. Obama has said he found religion through the minister in the 1980s. He joined the church in 1991 and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith.
The title of Mr. Obama’s bestseller "The Audacity of Hope" comes from one of Wright’s sermons. Mr. Wright is one of the first people Mr. Obama thanked after his election to the Senate in 2004. Mr. Obama consulted Mr. Wright before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Mr. Wright before announcing his candidacy last year.
Mr. Obama obviously would not choose to belong to Mr. Wright’s church and seek his advice unless he agreed with at least some of his views. In light of Mr. Wright's perspective, Michelle Obama's comment that she feels proud of America for the first time in her adult life makes perfect sense.
Much as most of us would appreciate the symbolism of a black man ascending to the presidency, what we have in Barack Obama is a politician whose closeness to Mr. Wright underscores his radical record.
The media have largely ignored Mr. Obama's close association with Mr. Wright. This raises legitimate questions about Mr. Obama's fundamental beliefs about his country. Those questions deserve a clearer answer than Mr. Obama has provided so far.
Mr. Kessler, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter, is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com and the author of "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack" (Crown Forum, 2007).
No Terror Attacks Are No Accident By Ronald Kessler Newsmax, Dec. 31, 2007
As we finish another year without a terrorist attack, it’s a good time to think about why. The media and liberal politicians will tell you it’s an accident or a matter of luck. They are dead wrong.
The reason we have not been attacked in the more than six years after 9/11 is the hard work of the FBI, the CIA, and our military, and the sweeping changes that have taken place in the intelligence community under George W. Bush.
Bush’s proclamation that any country harboring a terrorist will be considered a terrorist country has meant that Arab countries began cooperating in the war on terror, turning over thousands of terrorists and leads.
Bush made the FBI become more prevention-oriented. While the FBI always wanted to stop terrorist plots and did so in many cases, when it got the bad guys, as it did in the first World Trade Center bombing, it usually closed the case. Now every case becomes the basis for developing new sources who may be run out for years to infiltrate terrorist groups.
As Art Cummings, who heads the FBI’s international counterterrorism operations, told me for my book The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, Pre-9/11, the first consideration was, I got an indictment in my pocket ... Slap it down on the table, pick the guy up, you throw him on an airplane. You bring him home, you put him in jail, and you go, ‘Okay, I’ve done a great job today.’"
If that were to happen today, Cummings says, "I would have told my agents they basically just put Americans more in jeopardy rather than less in jeopardy. It’s a completely different approach and bears little resemblance to the previous one."
Now when an agent wants to make an arrest, Cummings tells the agent, "Your objective is not to make the arrest. Your objective is to make that suspect our collection platform. That guy now is going to tell us just how big and broad the threat might be. He now becomes a means to collection, instead of the target of collection. I want you to understand his entire universe."
According to the media, the FBI and CIA still don’t talk to each other. But in 2005, Bush established the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va., where 200 analysts from the CIA and FBI sit side-by-side analyzing threats 24 hours a day. A secure video conference takes place three times a day with all members of the intelligence community and the White House to analyze threats and parcel out leads.
The USA Patriot Act has torn down the so-called wall imposed by Attorney General Janet Reno, a wall that prevented FBI agents from sharing information with each other and with the CIA. The much-maligned Patriot Act has allowed the FBI to wiretap a terrorist regardless of what phone he uses, an authority the FBI already had in organized crime cases. The National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts ordered by Bush opened for the FBI a window on terrorist activity within the U.S.
Since 9/11, the FBI, CIA, and the military have rolled up some 5,000 terrorists worldwide — a headline you will never see in the Washington Post or New York Times. Thus, many plots are never hatched, because terrorists have been killed, arrested, or sent back to their own countries and imprisoned.
Instead of hailing the efforts to connect the dots, the media demonize those who are trying to protect us and portray the tools that uncover clues to plots as "spying on innocent Americans." When a plot is successfully rolled up, the media minimize it.
When the FBI foiled a plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport in June 2007, the New York Times buried the story on page A37 of its final edition. In the dream world of the editors of the New York Times, such threats to America are far less important than the fact that 75-year-old Andrea Mosconi has a job of playing violins in a museum in Italy to keep them in shape, a feature which the Times played on page one the same day.
The media have even managed to portray Saddam Hussein as relatively benign. But as revealed in "The Terrorist Watch," in seven months of secret debriefings, Saddam admitted to FBI agent George Piro that he planned to resume his weapons of mass destruction program — including developing nuclear weapons — within a year.
Many in the media could not bear to hear that Bush might have been at least partially right about Saddam, and few newspapers reported the story.
When the media and politicians run out of ways to deny credit to Bush for making us safer, they will claim that al-Qaida has chosen to space out its attacks. But al-Qaida’s attempt to blow up nine American airliners crossing the Atlantic in 2006 and the alleged role of an al-Qaida affiliate in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto are reminders that al-Qaida is constantly on the attack.
While the media underplay the threats, distort descriptions of the measures needed to uncover the next plot, and mischaracterize the progress in the war on terror, they also undermine it by revealing secrets of how the FBI and CIA are trying to stop the next attack. If the media revealed real abuses, they would be justified in exposing them, but that has not been the case. Since 9/11, the courts and Congress have allowed all of the Bush programs for uncovering terrorists to continue.
Calling the media disclosures "devastating," Fran Townsend, who leaves this week as chief of the White House counterterrorism efforts, told me, "It’s not just a question of you’re putting individuals at risk. The real risk is to the lives of Americans who may suffer an attack because we couldn’t stop it, because the source was taken out."
Without a reliable way to get information about this secret war, Americans are at the mercy of the media’s slanted portrayal.
Referring to President Bush, Chris Matthews said to Rudy Giuliani recently on MSNBC, "When he was in New York at Ground Zero in his most memorable statement ever, he said we`re going to get the people who knock down these buildings ... How many years do you think the American people should wait for our president to make good on his promise to get the guys who killed 3,000 Americans? This guy [Osama bin Laden] is apparently in Pakistan, and we haven’t done it. Are you satisfied with this?"
In fact, with the exception of bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who are isolated, nearly all the al-Qaida operatives responsible for the 9/11 attack have been killed or captured.
Contrary to Matthews’ insinuation and to the New York Times’ Dec. 31 editorial assertion that Bush’s policies "have not made any of us safer," the war on terror has been an astounding success. But that success has led many Americans to become complacent.
As a result, in the 2008 presidential election, we face a critical choice: Given that al-Qaida is intent on wiping out the U.S. with nuclear weapons, as FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has told me, do we continue on the offensive, dealing with threats before they materialize, or do we return to the pre-9/11 approach?
Back then, because of politically correct rules imposed by the Clinton administration, FBI agents were not allowed to follow suspects into mosques that are open to the public. CIA officers had to get special permission to recruit sources with so-called human rights violations. FBI agents could not look at public online chat rooms to develop leads on people who might be recruiting terrorists or distributing information on making explosives.
If NSA intercepted a call from bin Laden to an operative in New York about detonating a nuclear device the next day, the FBI was not allowed to see a transcript of the call because no warrant had been obtained in advance.
Already, politicians are trying to roll back the clock and take away tools necessary not only to connect the dots, but to find them in the first place. In fact, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama last August voted against revising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow NSA to continue to monitor calls by foreign terrorists without a warrant even if all parties are situated overseas.
In an example of that same short-sightedness, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards claimed that the war on terror is not a strategy to make America safer. Rather, it’s a political slogan or "bumper sticker" used by the Bush administration to cover up its mistakes.
"Remember that old Edmund Burke quote," Republican candidate Mitt Romney responded. "‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ And that, I am afraid, is the boiled-down version of what John Edwards said—that good men should do nothing. Put their head in the sand and hope it all goes away."
"When you go so far as to suggest that the global war on terror is a bumper sticker or slogan, it kind of makes the point that I’ve been making over and over again that the Democrats or at least some of them are in denial…" Giuliani said.
Contrary to John Edwards’ take, the lesson of the 1990s when terrorists first attacked the World Trade Center and attacked American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole is, "We just didn’t take it seriously enough," Senator Joe Lieberman, also a Democrat, has told me.
Asked how he feels about attacks by Democrats on measures like the Patriot Act and programs like the NSA intercepts to help track and apprehend terrorists, Lieberman says he is "disappointed" because "my colleagues for various reasons — some ideological, some political — are missing this threat to us."
Those on the front lines of the war on terror know exactly what is at stake.
"You make a mistake, there are dead people," Art Cummings says.
When I interviewed Bush with other journalists in September, the president made it clear that he will never back down.
As we enter a new year, the question for all of us is: Will we?
The President’s Stealth Counselor
By Ronald Kessler
Newsmax, May 1, 2006
According to the mythology in the media, George Bush is a puppet of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or neo-cons at the Pentagon. Alternatively, the president is so stubborn he listens to no one.
The truth is that Bush makes his own decisions, but the greatest influence on him is his wife. The Bushes are more effective than the FBI or CIA at keeping secret what goes on in the White House residence, the Crawford ranch, and Camp David. Whenever Laura Bush is asked by reporters if she gives her husband advice, she denies it. After all, "advice" implies the superior knowledge or wisdom of the person dispensing it. But behind the scenes, Laura’s influence extends not only to her husband but to administration policy, budget, and personnel decisions.
Only two examples of Laura Bush’s counseling her husband have come out. The first was soon after 9/11, when Bush said Osama bin Laden was "wanted dead or alive." Sidling up to him later, she gently jibed, "Bushie, you gonna git ’im?" The president got the point.
The second example was in July 2003, when Bush said, "Bring ’em on," referring to those who would attack American forces in Iraq.
"Whoa, Bushie!" the first lady said to him afterward.
But while those examples are known, like most spouses who respect each other, the Bushes influence each other on a daily basis. The president has drawn his wife out from behind her books to make an impact on the world stage. In turn, she has helped him smooth out his rough edges, acquire more discipline and balance, and expand his world view.
What the public doesn’t know is that the Bush administration asks for Laura’s opinion and any suggestions she may have on possible appointments and on issues affecting a range of agencies if they deal with subjects which she has committed herself to promoting, or if she has a strong interest in an issue. They include such areas as education, the arts, women’s rights, juveniles with social problems, AIDS, libraries, and the humanities. Because of her influence, a range of agencies have not undergone budget cuts or have received more funding.
If Laura feels that the staff is offering counsel that is "inconsistent with what she sees in the president’s heart, she is not bashful about telling us," Andrew H. "Andy" Card, Jr., the former White House chief of staff, told me. When considering important appointments or appointments to agencies that are part of her portfolio, Bush solicits her opinion. "He will say, ‘Why don’t you check with Laura and see if she has any ideas?’ Or he’ll say, ‘Did you run that by Laura? What’s Laura’s reaction?’" Card said.
The first lady has also suggested strategy. According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, it was Laura’s "initiative and her idea to really fully and completely expose what the Taliban regime was doing to women, emphasizing violations of women’s rights prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan."
Beyond such examples of direct influence, "Laura reads almost everything," Card said. "She reads the newspapers, the magazines, and the books. She reads things that would not be of interest to the president. If there’s something she reads that she thinks the president should be reading, she is better than anyone at encouraging him to read it," Card said.
As his stealth counselor, Laura often influences the president by simply rolling her eyes, archly asking a question, or making a teasing comment.
"I think the reason their relationship is so wonderful is that it’s clearly emotionally close, but it’s also kind of on an intellectual level," said Condi Rice, who spent almost every weekend with them at the ranch or at Camp David when she was national security advisor. "They discuss things. If she disagrees, she might roll her eyes or say, ‘You don’t really think that, do you?’ It’s soft. It’s not harsh."
Besides being an unofficial advisor, Laura Bush is an aggressively supportive wife. Only those who have a strong marriage know how important that can be, how one’s success or failure can ride on the reactions—however subtle—of the other partner.
In the face of constant attacks by the media, Laura’s positive outlook sustains Bush and strengthens his resolve. When Teresa Heinz made her comment that Laura never had a "real job," Laura told her outraged twin daughters at the dinner table in the residence that she understood the pressure John Kerry’s wife was under. The truth was that not only had Laura worked as a librarian and inner city school teacher, she went in on her own time on Saturdays to help black children who were having difficulty reading, according to Jimmy McCarroll, who was dating her at the time.
If Bush ever starts to veer off course, Laura is there to keep him grounded.
"One time I was sitting in the Treaty Room with the president and Laura," Laura’s friend Adair Margo said. "He was smoking a cigar and called Condi Rice to tell her she had done a great job on a speech she had given that day. He then told Laura about a speech he had given that same afternoon and how he had had lots to say, talking for about forty minutes. She listened and then said, ‘Did you have a little bit of Clintonitis?’"
Illustrating the relationship between the president and first lady, Andy Card related a touching moment. Bush had just had a meeting with members of the House on pending legislation. He was getting ready to go off in the helicopter to Kentucky.
"He came out of the Cabinet room," Card said. "The helicopter had landed. People were getting on their coats to run off to the helicopter."
Karen Keller, Bush’s personal secretary, ran outside.
"The first lady is calling for you," she said.
"Is it an emergency?" Bush asked.
"I don’t think it’s an emergency, but she’d like to talk with you before you leave," Keller said.
"He goes back into the Oval Office and calls her on the phone," Card said. After a minute, he opened the door to the Oval Office and looked out with a smile on his face.
"That was great," Bush said to his chief of staff. "She was just calling to tell me she loves me."
Ronald Kessler, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter, is the author of Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady.
Wiretap Dance
By Ronald Kessler
Wall Street Journal Op-ed, December 21, 2005
Ever since 9/11, the media and congressional critics have waged a relentless battle against President Bush for not doing enough to prevent the terrorist attacks. Now these same critics have begun a campaign against the Bush administration for doing too much to prevent the next attack.
The latest example is the New York Times' revelation that after 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept communications with an overseas nexus to uncover information about possible al Qaeda attacks. The fact that Mr. Bush bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lays out procedures for intercepting communications in terrorist cases, raises legitimate concerns. But it should be of more concern that al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations are trying to obtain nuclear and biological weapons that could wipe out major cities, kill millions of people and devastate the American economy.
Against that kind of threat, the FISA procedures are simply too slow. Even under the law's emergency provisions, once the FBI learns about the need to intercept a phone conversation or email communication, it takes at least a day -- often longer -- to obtain all the necessary approvals, including the signature of the attorney general.
But a delay of even an hour may have grave consequences. If NSA learns, for example, that Osama bin Laden or one of his henchmen is using a satellite phone, the agency must listen in immediately; the opportunity might not present itself again. A delay of five minutes could mean a critical piece of information is missed, or a terrorist may stop using that phone and use another phone. That is exactly what happened after an Aug. 17, 1998, Washington Post article quoted a former CIA official saying that he was "aware of intercepted electronic communications among bin Laden associates in the aftermath of the embassy bombings [in Africa] in which they take credit for the attacks and exchange warm congratulations."
The fact that we have not had an attack in more than four years is due in part to the NSA intercept program. It allowed the FBI -- to cite just one example -- to foil a 2003 plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting its suspension cables. In that case, Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and al Qaeda operative, pleaded guilty later that year to providing material support to terrorists.
In proposing FISA to Congress in 1978, the Carter administration specifically stated that passage of the new law would not necessarily preclude the president from "using his powers granted under the Constitution to carry out foreign policy and intelligence activities," according to Griffin B. Bell, the attorney general when the law was drafted and enacted. There was a "tacit agreement that FISA was not intended to displace the president's authority," Mr. Bell told me earlier this week.
Citing that authority, the Bush administration disclosed the NSA intercept program at its inception to congressional leaders, the FISA court and NSA's inspector general. In addition, Mr. Bush set up a Justice Department review process, which retroactively examines the intercepts to ensure that the program is being carried out according to the terms of the president's authorization. Yet some of those same congressional leaders who were briefed on the program, like Sen. Harry Reid, now castigate the president for disregarding the Constitution.
During the reign of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau spied on war protesters and political opponents of the president. Hoover also gathered blackmail material to be used against potential congressional critics and even presidents. In light of those abuses, Americans must be vigilant about possible violations of civil liberties. But the abuses were just that -- abuses. Since Hoover died in 1972, the FBI has not, as an organization, engaged in unlawful conduct. And today we are living in a new world, where terrorists are trying to bring an end to our civilization.
The most fundamental way to stop the next attack is through inside information. As we now know, the 9/11 hijackers received instructions from al Qaeda operatives overseas through emails at libraries. If the Israelis, for example, had relayed a tip about the emails, NSA could have intercepted the communications, and the FBI might have disrupted the 9/11 plot. Waiting for the FISA court to approve an intercept could have meant that a chance to prevent the deaths of almost 3,000 people was lost.
Certainly the Bush administration could have asked Congress for a law that would allow NSA to intercept calls and emails instantly while establishing a retroactive review process. But a quick glance at the history of the USA Patriot Act is instructive. Often mischaracterized, the legislation is simply an effort to update existing law to keep up with technology and give the FBI the same powers in terrorism cases that it already has in cases targeting drug traffickers, spies and Mafia figures. Under the Patriot Act, the FBI can obtain authorization to wiretap a terrorist in a national security investigation no matter what phone he uses. Previously, the FBI had to obtain new authorization each time a terrorist used a new pay phone, disposable cell phone or fax machine. By the time the FBI obtained nearly a dozen signatures on a wiretap application and the approval of a FISA judge, the terrorist had usually changed phones.
This should not be a controversial measure. Yet the American Civil Liberties Union and like-minded groups have whipped librarians into hysteria, claiming that the FBI can now use "sneak and peek" tactics in libraries to probe the reading habits of sinless grandmothers without informing the targets until after a search. The FBI has no interest in people's reading habits. If a terrorist were about to unleash a biological attack that might kill 10,000 people, would anyone want the FBI to inform him before agents come out to his house to search his computer? In any case, more than four years after enactment of the Patriot Act, the FBI has conducted no searches at libraries using the controversial business records provision of the act.
Given this situation, and the fact that the Senate has allowed key provisions of the Patriot Act to expire at the end of this year, the president rightly chose the course of defending the country over risking a fruitless battle with Congress.
What people do not understand about George Bush is that he is not interested in short-term popularity or media approval. Given a choice between avoiding the wrath of the media and congressional critics and preventing an attack that could kill millions, this president will take the latter course every time.
Mr. Kessler is the author of books on the FBI and CIA, and, most recently, of A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush (Sentinel, 2004).
Bush Mythology
By Ronald Kessler
National Review Online, August 16, 2004
If you believe the media and the recent spate of books about George W. Bush, the president has a short attention span—yet from the day he took office he was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He is a puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove—but he does not listen to anyone’s advice. His decisions are made for him by warring factions within his administration—but he stubbornly clings to his own views. He graduated from Yale and HarvardBusinessSchool but is a dimwit. He appointed Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to two of the most powerful positions in the government but is an intolerant right-winger.
If the caricatures are conflicting, they are also wrong. For my biography of Bush, I interviewed his close friends going back to Andover and Yale as well as the key players in his administration—White House chief of staff Andrew Card, political guru Karl Rove, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, counsel Alberto Gonzales, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others. Yet some of the most telling illustrations of what Bush is really like emerged from interviews with people most have never heard of.
Barnett “Sandy” Kress, a lawyer and former Democratic member of the Dallas school board, told me how, when he was only thinking about running for governor, Bush became interested in why so many kids couldn’t read and what could be done about it. Bush asked Kress dozens of questions: What are the best ways to teach reading? What are other states doing? Taking notes on a legal pad, Bush wanted to know who had studied the issue. Kress mentioned six experts in the field.
“People think he shoots from the hip or that he’s not smart,” Kress said. “It baffles me...He was an incredible student of these issues. He had a voracious appetite for information. He looked into the problem and researched it....I gave him six names. He called them all. They were as stunned as I was.”
If Kress was amazed, Dr. G. Reid Lyon, a reading expert at the National Institutes of Health, was even more astonished when he answered his phone in Rockville, Maryland, in 1995 and was told the governor of Texas was calling. Bush had heard that Lyon, a research psychologist and former teacher, had studied the reading problem and had found that a faddish approach to teaching kids to read was behind the poor reading scores. Introduced in the 1970s, the whole language method held that the traditional, phonics-based method of teaching kids to sound out letters—“a” has the sound of “ay” as in “bay,” or “ah” as in cat—is boring. Instead, nutty as it sounds, under the whole language approach, kids were taught to read by simply giving them books and expecting that they would become so enthralled that they would figure out the words themselves. Essentially, that meant kids were not being taught to read at all.
Today, an unbelievable 40 percent of fourth graders cannot read a simple children’s book. The non-teaching method of whole language is particularly hard on minorities. Nationally, 65 percent of black fourth graders and 59 percent of Hispanic fourth graders cannot read a simple children’s book. Without being able to read even driving directions, they face a lifetime of failure.
Based on Lyons’ advice, Bush developed a way to restore phonics to reading instruction in Texas. The results were dramatic. In 1995, 23 percent of third graders could not read. By 2003, that figure had improved to ten percent, according to state testing figures compiled by Kress, who became Bush’s unpaid education advisor. After additional help for kids who failed, only two percent could not read. The greatest beneficiaries of restoring phonics to reading instruction—which includes work on comprehension, spelling, and actual reading—were minorities.
When Bush became president, he tried do the same thing nationally through the No Child Left Behind Act. Under the law, local school systems receive federal money for reading programs if they adopt teaching methods that have been scientifically proven to work. Based on NIH-supported research on more than 44,000 students, that method is phonics.
Despite the law, because of foot-dragging by teachers and their unions which resist change, sixty percent of school systems continue to teach whole language. Rather than use a method that works, New York City stubbornly clings in the vast majority of its schools to what is essentially a whole language approach, turning out hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids over the years. Yet I found that the toniest private schools in New York—the Collegiate, Brearley, St. David’s, and Dalton schools—all use phonics to teach reading.
“Of course we teach phonics,” Beth Tashlik, the head of the CollegiateSchool’s lower school, told me. “You can’t teach reading without it.”
Ironically, unless they are wealthy and send their kids to private schools, New York liberals who most oppose Bush are the ones whose kids cannot read because their own public schools resist Bush’s efforts to restore phonics to reading instruction.
Unlike Bush, the media rarely dig into the subject.
“Nobody wants to write the real story of why kids can’t read,” Margaret Spellings, Bush’s domestic policy advisor, told me. “I don’t know if it’s too hard.”
Indeed, caricatures are far easier to create.
“It is amazing to me that Bush is thought of as a right winger who doesn’t care about minorities,” Lyon said. “He saved so many of their lives.”
