The Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Drudge has posted a transcript of tonight’s slugfest between Bill OReilly and Michael Moore.  For the most part it’s a couple of buffoons arguing back and forth, but there are a couple of points I wanted to address.

O: Ok, he says in his book George Tenet looked the president in the eye, like how I am looking you in the eye right now and said “President, weapons of mass destruction are a quote, end quote, “slam dunk” if you’re the president, you ignore all that?

M: Yeah, I would say that the CIA had done a pretty poor job.

O: I agree.  The lieutenant was fired.

M: Yeah, but not before they took us to war based on his intelligence.  This is a man who ran the CIA, a CIA that was so poorly organized and run that it wouldn’t communicate with the FBI before September 11th and as a result in part we didn’t have a very good intelligence system set up before September 11th.

Moore is either completely ignorant of the pre-9/11 intelligence situation or he’s being inteltionally deceptive.  When the CIA was created in 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act it was specifically barred from any domestic police activity.  The CIA got around this by sharing information extensively with the FBI under operations like COINTELPRO.  When that scandal came to light rules were put in place to prevent the sharing of information between the two agencies.  It was precisely because of these rules that, prior to 9/11 there was no cooperation between the CIA and domestic police agencies.  While I believe that the CIA was indeed run poorly prior to (and after) 9/11, the face that there was no information sharing going on had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Ironically, one of the main purposes of the PATRIOT Act was to remove these self-imposed restrictions and permit the CIA and FBI to share information related to terrorism.  I wonder if Moore knew that when he was driving around Congress in an ice cream truck reading the text of the bill through a loudspeaker.