THE NEW BENEDICT ARNOLDS?

AJ Strata was one of the first to speculate that so-called "protest" resignation of Judge Robertson from the FISA court may have really been because he was one of the leakers of the classified NSA program. He and others are now wondering if Jay Rockefeller's atypical silence may not also be suggestive:

We will know for sure if Robertson starts missing days on the bench on the DC circuit court - a position he has not resigned yet. But one he cannot retain while under investigation.
Mac Ranger believes this fits his scenario where an all of sudden very quiet Senator Rockefeller is also under investigation for leaking the NSA program. The NY Times story that leaked and damaged the surveillance program mentioned the good Senator by name. Guess he forgot to go on background.
Now Rush Limbaugh has joined the dance in looking at Judge Robertson as a possible modern day Benedict Arnold.

This is serious talk, folks. As Jack Kelly points out, after the extreme reaction we all witnessed to the supposed "outing" of Valerie Plame; the whining and wailing and gnashing of teeth about the critical nature of our intelligence capability and the seriousness of its compromise; we now have a situation where:

A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaida suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant.

"We're seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was not the program Risen and Lichtblau wrote about. The scandal is that they wrote about it.

The Left has made a mountain out of Plame --a relative molehill in the great scheme of things--and now they are hoist on their own petard (how's that for mixing metaphors?). Not that I think that the disclosure of classified information in both cases should not be taken as a serious offense; but there was every reason in the Plame affair to believe that the person who actually compromised her was her own husband; while with the NSA dustup, we are dealing with a matter with consequences several orders of magnitude more serious for our national security.

The angry hysterics of the Left can reason it out--if they are capable of even the most rudimentary reasoning skills anymore. Whatever the statutory or constitutional precedent or legality of President Bush's actions--and I happen to think the legal evidence is decidedly in the President's favor--his actions follow a tradition of jockeying for power between the executive and legislative branches that has embroiled most administrations and most congresses since our nation was founded. It would be the President's inaction and lack of attention to these issues in after 9/11 that would be more worrisome.

OTOH, there can be no doubt that the release of information regarding a highly classified and active national security program that is tracking the enemy during a war is definitely illegal; not to mention irresponsible and treasonous. That such an action could possibly be justified as taken "for the good of the nation" is laughable. That the Left sees this as an indication of imminent "fascism" is hilarious, given that it is not different significantly from what previous presidents have done (and most of them did not even do it in a time of active war with military operations ongoing ).

There may be some cynical creatures out there (myself included) who have wondered if Valerie Plame was ever in any real danger because the supposed "secret" of her CIA involvement was made public several years after her covert status was ended. But even the most cynical person in our midst cannot help but conclude that in the NSA leak, we are talking about exposing possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent American lives to the risk of terrorist attacks that might have been prevented by this very program.

If Valerie Plame's position at the CIA was classified; and if was deliberately leaked for political purposes then whoever did it should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The act of deliberatly and maliciously exposing a highly classified program (there is no "if" in this case) and the leaking of of highly classified information (again, no "if") during a time of war so that it aids and abets the enemy and puts American lives at risk--is usually referred to as "treason". Whoever conspired to do it should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

In 1780 Benedict Arnold formed a plot to surrender the fort at West Point, New York to the British. His name has gone down in American history as synonymous with the word "traitor".

Whoever leaked the NSA program (and I am certain that the person or persons will eventually be identified--and it may or may not be Rockefeller or Robertson-- and whoever willingly published that information in the media, is playing the same lethal game betrayal that Arnold engaged in; and I sincerely and earnestly hope they suffer the same historical consequences.