Yesterday, The LA Times trashed George W. Bush's usage of Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Alihdhar. The two hijackers popped up in Bush's radio address as prime examples of who we must, but previously could not, tap. As it turned out, not only had they been tapped, but the data was analyzed and the NSA, the agency in charge of our new and improved surveillance program, simply declined to share their findings.
But Bush was undeterred by the falsity of his tale, and simply switched tactics for this week's press conference. Now the smoking gun was a leak that tipped Osama bin Laden off to the fact that we knew he had a mobile phone. To Bush, this showed how dastardly leakers are. And in this case, at least, that's true. Because the leak was Osama himself:
The al Qaeda leader's communication to aides via satellite phone had already been reported in 1996 -- and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.
The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.
Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps, missing him by hours.
So, the two primary examples Bush used to support his program were total fabrications. And yet we're supposed to blindly trust him to carry out a massive, secret espionage operation. Survey says? No.
