The phony scandal to cover Pelosi

Andrew McCarthy:

With Speaker Pelosi caught in the web of her own deceit over what the CIA told her about “torture,” and the Obama administration in the middle of its latest 180-degree reversal over CIA interrogators (Attorney General Holder is now considering prosecutions despite Obama’s promise of no prosecutions), Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating — not implementing, but essentially brainstorming about — plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.

This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time — and that’s saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about President Bush’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and given President Clinton’s indignant insistence (against the weight of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was doing for the last eight years?

And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to kill or capture bin Laden, why weren’t they screaming from the rafters about such a lapse?

Of course the CIA has been trying to figure out how to take out top al-Qaeda leaders. One assumes — one hopes — they are also brainstorming about wiping out the Taliban, overthrowing the Iranian regime, undermining Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program, disrupting Syrian support of Hezbollah, and tackling all manner of threats to the United States. But there is no law that requires, or could practically require, the CIA to brief Congress every time some agency component considers the feasibility of some security initiative.

Gen. George Washington himself observed that “upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises . . . and for want of it, they are generally defeated.” Washington thought it obvious that secrecy was the heart of good intelligence. That is a big part of why intelligence activities are executive in nature, a core part of what the Supreme Court long ago recognized as the “delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” Secrecy cannot be preserved in a system of national security by political committee, much less a system in which a sprawling, 17-agency intelligence community is forced to share all of its secrets, in real time, with 535 members of Congress.

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When everyone is being an adult and acting in good faith, this doesn’t present a problem. No one expects the CIA to alert congressional leadership every time some agent conjures up a potential operation or to waste Congress’s time with briefings to explain the agency’s current thinking on matters (like how to neutralize al-Qaeda) that everyone knows the agency is working on. After all, if Congress wants to inquire about such things, it can ask. At the same time, if the CIA is about to embark on an effort that could have significant policy or security consequences, it is in the interest of the president and the country that bipartisan congressional leadership be given a heads-up.

Problems arise, though, if congressional leadership goes juvenile, as has happened in recent times. Sen. Patrick Leahy, for example, had to be removed from the Senate Intelligence Committee several years ago for leaking classified information. And when Democrats decided to politicize our national security through demagoguery about “torture” and “domestic spying,” their leaders took to misrepresenting the fact that they were informed about — and were supportive of — these policies from the beginning. Such shenanigans make the notification process not only pointless but counterproductive.

That is the setting of the latest controversy. Needing some back-up for Pelosi’s smear that the CIA regularly lies to Congress, Democrats came up with a vaguely worded whopper about how the agency withheld from Congress that it was developing a “secret plan” to conduct “intelligence activities.” Now, as the “I” in CIA stands for “Intelligence,” and as most of the agency’s activities are secret, one might not think there was anything very startling about all this — especially given that the “secret plan” to conduct “intelligence activities” was never “implemented.” But Democrats reached into their bag of tricks for that favorite of all talismans — the name “Cheney” — and their pied-piper media played right along. It was somehow a story because, whatever the “secret plan” may have been, it was Darth Vader who’d hidden it from Congress.

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This scandal appears to have exploded in the Democrats face. They have gone strangely silent now that it has emerged that the "secret plan" was to kill the enemy. Do Democrats really have a problem with that?

Do they realize how ridiculous they look?