So where’s President Obama’s defense of government when you need it?
We’re not talking about ObamaCare. We’re talking about the National Security Agency, which has come under fresh attack from Edward Snowden.
That attack comes in the form of a manifesto he published in Germany’s Der Spiegel. In it, a man wanted on espionage charges by the United States and living in that paragon of privacy rights, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, proclaims himself a hero for having exposed America’s spying activities (which he did while also spreading some disinformation). Never mind that for all the breathless headlines, there is still zero evidence the NSA violated the law.
The president deserves some blame for a state of affairs where a fugitive from American justice has more credibility than the agency that helps keep us safe. From the start, Obama’s been desultory in his efforts to bring Snowden back, and when the NSA monitoring of leaders like Angela Merkel emerged, instead of noting that everyone does it (a French cabinet minister lamented only that France does not have the technical capabilities America does), he started another apology tour.
The irony here is two-fold: First, President Obama’s refusal to defend his intelligence operatives stands in stark contrast to all the criticism after 9/11 about how our intel agencies “connect the dots.” Now people are complaining because we’re collecting the dots. Which you would think a liberal president would understand is the key to preventing war, by using good information to prevent attacks before they happen.
Second, members from both parties on the House and Senate intel committees have been more steadfast defenders of the president’s intel policies and the NSA than the president himself. Just last week, the Senate intel committee affirmed the NSA’s ability to collect phone calls of Americans, albeit with restrictions on how they can use the data.
When he was running for office in 2008, then-Sen. Obama claimed the Iraq invasion was based on “unconvincing intelligence” and vowed that as president he would “strengthen our intelligence” to “better collect and analyze information” so we could carry out operations to disrupt terrorist plots and break up terrorist networks.
Note to Obama: A president who wants good intel must defend the men and women who are getting it to him in the face of disinformation and attacks.