Safire is more a libertarian conservative than a

Neocon-artist. Note how he speaks from experience — being told to leak a story and being spied on because of that “leak.” Don’t

overlook his point that Duhbya has “made out to believe” some misleading statements — that’s Duhbya’s way with everything. “Mislead”

— you mean lie? mjh

Transcript for

January 1 – Meet the Press, online at MSNBC – MSNBC.com

MR. SAFIRE: OK. I have a thing about wiretapping. …

I was

writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president [mjh: Raygun?] looks at it and says, “OK, I’ll go with

it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we’ll get something in

the paper.”

And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or

something, and I said, “Hey, you want a leak? I’ll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform.”

And he took it down and wrote a little story about it.

But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so

they hear a White House speechwriter say, “Hey, you want a leak?” And so they tapped my phone, and for six

months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn’t like that. And when it finally broke–it did me a lot of good at the time,

frankly, because then I was on the right side–but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected

of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home–you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my–

everything.

So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what’s happening now is that the–as a result of that

scandal back in the ’70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now,

this court’s a rubber-stamp court, let’s face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.

MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act, FISA.

MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows

believe ….

[T]hat’s why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when

they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can’t seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends

looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I’m with the critics on

that.

Military Times Polls
Troops sound off
Military Times Poll finds high

morale, but less support for Bush, war effort
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer

Support for President Bush and

for the war in Iraq has slipped significantly in the last year among members of the military’s professional core, according to

the 2005 Military Times Poll.

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority,

among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers. …

Positive feelings about Congress, civilian and uniformed

Pentagon leaders and the media all fell. …

While roughly a third of Americans describe themselves as Democrats, just 13

percent of Military Times Poll respondents do so. …

Kohn said he worried that asking such questions of military members

and publishing the results could tarnish the military’s image as a nonpartisan institution.

The poll “tends to communicate to the

American people that the military is just like any other interest group,” Kohn said. “We want the public image of the military to be

decidedly apolitical.”

Military Times Polls
Disconnect cited

between troops, civilian leadership
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer

From Congress to the White House to the

Pentagon, the career-oriented heart of the military appears increasingly estranged from its leaders in Washington,

according to results of the 2005 Military Times Poll.

The poll of active-duty subscribers to the Military Times newspapers also

shows continued disdain for the media and a belief that the military’s prestige may have slipped in the eyes of

civilians. …

58 percent agreed that President Bush had their best interests at heart, down 11 percentage points from a year ago.

…

Congress saw the most dramatic drop: Just 31 percent agreed Congress looked out for their best interests, less than half the

number a year ago. …

David Segal, an expert in military sociology at the University of Maryland , said the results mirror a

similar estrangement between civilian Americans and their political leaders.

“I see military attitudes converging with

You’re not actually

surprised that domestic spying will prove extremely profitable to a few large corporations, are you? mjh

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
By

Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005

A year ago, at

a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high

schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret

400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more

than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group

being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project. …

The DOD database

obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far

from any military installation, post or recruitment center. …

Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense

Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. …

“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC

News military analyst Bill Arkin. …

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the

descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the

beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.” …

Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) is becoming

the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records”

include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation

pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats.

Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys

Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and

unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies. …

Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is

slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of

the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It’s absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth

Project.

“I mean, we’re based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are

Quakers.”

You’re not actually

surprised that domestic spying might involve sniffing through your communications, are you? mjh

Bush Defends Legality of

Domestic Spy Program By ERIC LICHTBLAU, New York Times

As President Bush continued to defend the program at his appearance in

San Antonio, he was asked about a remark he made in Buffalo in 2004 at an appearance in support of the Patriot Act, in which he discussed

government wiretaps.

“Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap,” Mr. Bush said at the appearance,

“a wiretap requires a court order.” He added: “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down

terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

Democrats have seized on the remark, made more than two

years after Mr. Bush authorized the N.S.A. to conduct warrantless wiretaps, in charging that the president had misled the public.

Asked about that today, Mr. Bush said: “I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This

is different from the N.S.A. program.

“The N.S.A. program is a necessary program. …”

Officials also say that the

N.S.A., beyond actual eavesdropping on up to 500 phone numbers and e-mail addresses at any one time, has conducted much larger

data-mining operations on vast volumes of communication within the United States to identify possible terror suspects.

To

accomplish this, the agency has reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the

country’s biggest “switches,” carrying phone and e-mail traffic into and out of the country.

Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program – New York

Times By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security

Agency’s domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight,

according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. …

Several senior government officials have said that when

the special operation first began, there were few controls on it. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with it, apparently fearful

of participating in an illegal operation, officials have said. …

But even after the imposition of the new restrictions last

year, the agency maintained the authority to choose its eavesdropping targets and did not have to get specific approval from the Justice

Department or other Bush officials before it began surveillance on phone calls or e-mail messages. The decision on whether someone is

believed to be linked to Al Qaeda and should be monitored is left to a shift supervisor at the agency, the White House

has said.