Ivory Dome

I found this letter from a lieutenant in our armed forces serving in Iraq over at Powerline this morning addressed to some reporters at the New York Times:

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Dear Messrs. Keller, Lichtblau & Risen:Congratulations on disclosing our government’s highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program (June 23). I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq. (Alas, operational security and common sense prevent me from even revealing this unclassified location in a private medium like email.)

Unfortunately, as I supervised my soldiers late one night, I heard a booming explosion several miles away. I learned a few hours later that a powerful roadside bomb killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company. I deeply hope that we can find and kill or capture the terrorists responsible for that bomb. But, of course, these terrorists do not spring from the soil like Plato’s guardians. No, they require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs in exchange for a few months’ salary. As your story states, the program was legal, briefed to Congress, supported in the government and financial industry, and very successful.

Not anymore. You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion — or next time I feel it — I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.

And, by the way, having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others — laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.

Very truly yours,

Tom Cotton
Baghdad, Iraq

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Thank you, sir.

Just in case you missed it, the NYT along with other news organizations have reported not only on a classified financial monitoring programs, but allso classified reports on troop reduciton levels and as a result are undermining our national security.

Before anyone jumps ship and condemns the Bush administration for eavsdropping on American’s know this (from the original NYT article about the financial monitoring program):

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The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

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The Bush administration has kep the other two branches of government in the loop. If these “domestic evesdropping” transgresions are so severe, shouldn’t someone either in congress or the FISA court speak out against them?

Any critisizm of the Bush administration is fair. Of all the blogs I have read concerning the evesdropping issue they reason that it is satisfactory to seek warrants, even on American’s, after the intelligence has already been gathered. I can’t say that I am outraged, but it doesn’t sit well with me either. I guess I am optimistic about the situation. Given the liberal outcry over this situation I wouldn’t think it wouldn’t be hard to gain the services of a pro bono attorney in the happenstance that an American Citizen was charged with crimes in accordance with the above mentioned survailence programs.

There are other issues at hand concerning the publishing of these articles, primarily the hypocrisy of the left when it comes to leaks of classified informaiton. If the leaks harm the Bush administration the leakers are whistleblowing heroes. If the leakers harm someone on the left then the leakers should be executed for treason. It is issues like these that I believe call mainstream liberal ideals into question. Because the left plays so much politics with our national security people become outraged, at least I do anyways.

This past Sunday is the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the Kobar towers. Time and time again our presidents cowerd and made excuses in the face of islamic extremeists and finally, thankfully in my lifetime, our country is standing up for our ideals.

I came to a realization the other day about one of the reasons anti-war types are anti-war. Time and time again I hear them complain that we shouldn’t be in Iraq because we shouldn’t attack a “sovereign” nation that never attacked us. This premise illustrates liberal’s shortsightedness.
As always, liberals believe their “plans” for America would put the nation on the correct path. Taking the idea mentioned above into consideration, liberals must believe it is logical to conclude that in order for the US to have the authority to remove Saddam, Saddam would have had to attack the US and as a result of that attack more innocent American deaths. I don’t agree with that one bit. Why should we have to wait for more people to die before we take action? In the end though, this discussion is irrelevant; we are in Iraq whether the liberals like it or not.
Moving on, my thoughts above kept me thinking more and I started to delve into the illogical. We know from the Duelfer report that Saddam fully intended to reconstitute his WMD programs once the UN sanctions were lifted. We know Saddam time and time again hoodwinked the UN into believing Saddam had no desire to reconstitute his WMD programs (this conclusion is derived form Saddam’s actions in the 90’s when he intentionally mislead inspectors to believe Saddam did not have WMDs). We know Saddam had, be UN definition (the rule that says Saddam could not possess missile with a range greater than 100km), WMDs because of the missiles that landed on my camp in Kuwait and the others that were shot down by our patriot missiles. We know Saddam had terror links and harbored terrorists. Given these facts I believe in OIF whole heartedly (the handling of the war is different issue, don’t get me started).
However, I will concede the fact my conclusion is illogical, given the fact the no one can predict the future and we cannot say for certain that Saddam would have reconstituted his WMD programs, or that Saddam would have further developed his relationship with terrorist organizations. That being said, the same statement can be made of arguments from the opposite end of the spectrum as well. The possibility exists that Saddam could have developed WMDs after sanctions were lifted and terrorist ties extensively developed. If that were the case then a terrorists attack directly connected to Saddam could have occurred and we would have to go into Iraq on down the line resulting in a far greater number of casualties seeing as Saddam had time to build WMDs.
Either way you want to look at it I think we did the right thing. That is just me, though, and my reasoning behind it. It is impossible to say what would happen one way or the other. I conclude however, that if the liberals had their way we would be living in some fantasy bubble where that because terrorists only hurt their own people and not Americans, in spite of 9/11, everything is OK. Whereas I and other like minded people believe there is evil out there and we aren’t going to wait for people to die to do something about that evil.