Posted on 05/13/2006 8:03:55 AM PDT by bnelson44
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 13, 2006
President's Radio Address
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. This week I nominated General Mike Hayden to be the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The work of the CIA is essential to the security of the American people. The enemies who struck our Nation on September the 11th, 2001, intend to attack us again, and to defeat them, we must have the best possible intelligence. In Mike Hayden, the men and women of the CIA will have a strong leader who will support them as they work to disrupt terrorist attacks, penetrate closed societies, and gain information that is vital to protecting our Nation.
General Hayden is supremely qualified to lead the CIA. For the last year, he's been our Nation's first Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and has played a critical role in our efforts to reform America's intelligence capabilities to meet the threats of a new century. He has more than 20 years of experience in the intelligence field. He served for six years as Director of the National Security Agency and has a track record of success in leading and transforming that large intelligence agency. He also has held senior positions at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, and he served behind the Iron Curtain in our embassy in Bulgaria during the Cold War.
Mike knows our intelligence community from the ground up. He's been both a producer and a consumer of intelligence and has overseen both human and technical intelligence activities, as well as the all-source analysis derived from those activities. Mike was unanimously confirmed by the Senate last year for his current post, and this week members of both parties have praised his nomination. I urge the Senate to confirm him promptly as the next Director of the CIA.
During General Hayden's tenure at the NSA, he helped establish and run one of our most vital intelligence efforts in the War on Terror -- the Terrorist Surveillance Program. As the 9/11 Commission and others have noted, our government failed to connect the dots in the years before the attacks of September the 11th. We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States made phone calls to al Qaeda operatives overseas, but we did not know about their plans until it was too late.
So to prevent another attack, I authorized the National Security Agency -- consistent with the Constitution and laws -- to intercept international communications in which one party has known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist groups. This terrorist surveillance program makes it more likely that killers like the 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time. It has helped prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad, and it remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with al Qaeda, we want to know about it. We will not sit back and wait to be attacked again.
This week, new claims have been made about other ways we are tracking down al Qaeda to prevent attacks on America. It is important for Americans to understand that our activities strictly target al Qaeda and its known affiliates. Al Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans. The intelligence activities I have authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat. The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda terrorists and its affiliates who want to harm the American people.
Americans expect their government to do everything in its power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. That is exactly what we are doing. And so far, we have been successful in preventing another attack on our soil. The men and women of the CIA are working around the clock to make our Nation more secure. I am confident that General Hayden will strengthen the CIA and integrate its vital work with our other intelligence agencies, so we can defeat the terrorists of the 21st century.
Thank you for listening.
END
I worry about him using the name Al Qaeda exclusively. With the Iranian business getting hotter all the time, I suspect we will need to gather the same kind of data relative to groups like Hezbollah and folks who are talking to known Iranian intelligence agents.
A secret is when no one who doesn't have a need to know, knows about it.
.
The Man who predicted 9/11...
and his own demise at the hands...
of Muslim fundamentalist extremists:
9/11 Lifesaver RICK RESCORLA
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24361
Because at the 1st Major Battle of the Vietnam War in the Valley of Death known as the IA DRANG Valley of November 1965...
RICK RESCORLA already knew that to win at war you must first...
...KNOW YOUR ENEMY..!!!
Signed:.."ALOHA RONNIE" Guyer
...a RICK RESCORLA Co-Veteran of the Battle of IA DRANG-1965
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_set1.htm
(Where RICK RESCORLA walked in Vietnam, exactly, 40 years ago - See 1st Picture)
.
Poll: Most Americans Support NSA's Efforts (POLL: 66% NOT BOTHERED IF NSA COLLECTS PHONE RECORDS )
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1631047/posts
Interesting. Thanks for the info. Seems to me you are correct.
DUmocrats are just worried that their daily talking point fax to Osama and Z-man might get intercepted.
From WaPo today, former deputy homeland security adviser and deputy assistant to the president Richard Falkenrath writes:
Bureaucrats excel at finding reasons not to do something. They are most often guilty of sins of omission, not commission. A timid, ordinary executive might have concluded that it was too risky to ask U.S. telecommunications companies to provide anonymized call records voluntarily to an agency such as the NSA, dealing with foreign intelligence. If the USA Today story is correct, it appears that Mike Hayden is no timid, ordinary executive. Indeed, it appears that he is exactly the sort of man that we should have at the helm of the CIA while we are at war.
"anonymized call records" must be to make the formulas work.
From the Weekly Standard
Since late 2001, Verizon, BellSouth, and ATT have connected nearly two trillion calls, according to the Washington Post. The companies gave NSA the incoming and outgoing numbers of those calls, stripped of all identifying information such as name or address. No conversational content was included. The NSA then put its supercharged computers to work analyzing patterns among the four trillion numbers involved in the two trillion calls, to look for clusters that might suggest terrorist connections. Though the details are unknown, they might search for calls to known terrorists, or, more speculatively, try to elicit templates of terror calling behavior from the data.As a practical matter, no one's privacy is violated by such analysis. Memo to privacy nuts: The computer does not have a clue that you exist; it does not know what it is churning through; your phone number is meaningless to it. The press loves to stress the astounding volume of data that data mining can consume--the Washington Post's lead on May 12 warned that the administration had been "secretly . . . assembling gargantuan databases." But it is precisely the size of that data store that renders the image of individualized snooping so absurd.
True, the government can de-anonymize the data if connections to terror suspects emerge, and it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses to put a name to critical phone numbers. But until that point is reached, your privacy is at greater risk from the Goodyear blimp at a Stones concert than from the NSA's supercomputers churning through trillions of zeros and ones representing disembodied phone numbers.
And even after that point is reached, the notion that 280 million Americans who have not been communicating with al Qaeda are at risk from this quadrillion-bit program is absurd. What exactly are the privacy advocates worried about? That an NSA agent will search the phone records of his ex-wife or of themselves? This quaint scenario completely misunderstands the scale of, and bureaucratic checks on, such data analysis programs.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/206zbpvd.asp?ZoomFont=YES
"If the USA Today story is correct, it appears that Mike Hayden is no timid, ordinary executive. Indeed, it appears that he is exactly the sort of man that we should have at the helm of the CIA while we are at war."
===
BUMP to your post. Thanks for posting that excellent excerpt. It's right on the money.
"THE NECESSITY OF PROCURING good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged--all that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favourable issue."
-- Gen. George Washington, Letter to Col. Elias Dayton, 26 July 1777
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For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 13, 2006
President's Radio Address
Audio
In Focus: National Security
In Focus: National Security
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For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 13, 2006
President's Radio Address
Audio
In Focus: National Security
In Focus: National Security
DUmocrats are just worried that their daily talking point fax to Osama and Z-man might get intercepted.
I like "DUmocrats" and plan to adopt it from now on.
I still worry about the "democrats for Kerry" who signed a letter to the editor of the Tehran Times in 2004. Why were no investigative reporters curious about who these American voters abroad were? Why are no investigative reporters sharing news from Iran with Americans? /rhetorical questions only, as it is obvious that Kerry supporters would probably not care if Ahma..jihad got nuclear capability. He would just become a "balance of power" against the perfidious Great Satan.
Kerry Says He Will Repair Damage [Kerry writes Islamic Republic's English Newspaper]
Tehran Times ^ | 2/8/04 | Tehran Times
Posted on 02/08/2004 4:14:42 PM EST by freedom44
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1074047/posts
Link to a thread from the Kerry Campaign to the Tehran Times in 2004 describing how his administration would get along so very well with the leaders of Iran.
Too bad that thread's link to the Tehran Times is dead...I'd have loved to pass it along to a few folks that still have their Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers...
I've adopted the descriptors "DUmocrats" and "LIEberals" (as well as variations such as "DUrbin" or "LIEberman". It seems to be catching on.
BINGO. If the government were NOT doing this, I would be hopping mad.
I'd have loved to pass it along to a few folks that still have their Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers...
$$$$$
Aren't they pathetic! Those bumper stickers really make me just smile.
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