| 07 January 2006 We Get Letters I should have enjoyed the holidays more than I did. It was nice not to think for little while. Once the week got going there was way too much to think about. A friend of mine works for a big company you would have heard of. He said there was an air of desperation on the first day back, and it got worse. Something about the quarterly numbers, and expenses. I asked him how that was possible, since he had told me they were growing at 20% per year, "best in class," he had said when the smell of roast turkey was still in the air. There was something about expense-to-revenue ratio, and profitability. I mulled that over. It was something I never had to understand in my years in the Government. We just were there , eternal. But that is not how it is out here in the wide world, and I apologize for any insensitivity about the nature of capitalism. I had planned on seeing him at the big conference out on the West Coast next week and we were going to catch up. He said he couldn't make it. There were some of Those Kind of Meetings to Make the Hard Choices that were suddenly scheduled, the ones with the doors closed, and I wondered if he was going to be OK. He said he might, and we arranged to have lunch sometime after I got back. I told him I would buy if he got fired, and it wasn't as funny as I thought it was after I said it. I wondered what it would be like if there was no paycheck at the end of the month, and all those holiday credit card bills still yet to come in. Not a good time to be out of work. I decided to take a look at my personal books, and see if I could create a little cushion. Just in case. It was a kind of New Year's resolution to put some additional effort into getting my arms around my little government account, and go out and talk to people, drum up some interest, create some buzz. There is no “pass back” from the Office of Management and Budget. That is the magic factoring number the agencies are directed to use as they finalize their budget numbers. It used to arrive before Christmas, just in time to ruin the holidays for the people who had to make the final decisions on what was in, and what was out of the next year's budget. The House is still not in session. They will not come back until the end of the month. They are all back in their Districts, trying to distance themselves from the Abramoff affair. Elections aren't until November, so they will have time to get their affairs in order, just in case. Still, the retainer for the attorney's is a burden. It is useful not to be in town, sometimes, but those who work here all the time don't have the option. Scandal has a way of making people transform their offices into bunkers to keep the press out. I suspect General Hayden is doing that. As Deputy to Ambassador Negroponte, and the senior uniformed intelligence officer in the government, he is a lightning rod for criticism. He was Director of the National Security Agency when they started doing whatever it is they were doing, and the worst possible thing is happening to him. He is becoming the subject of a letter-writing campaign about something that no one knows anything about. If you know, you can't say. If you don't know, you can say anything. It makes for a real mess. It appears to be about domestic intelligence collection, and the correspondence is flying. Congressional representatives get unlimited free postage, to communicate the truth to their constituents. It is called the “franking privilege.” It was a better deal when Dan Rostenkowski ran the House from his position as Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. He figured out an ingenious way to sell the free stamps back to the Post Office and pocket the money. There were reforms, of course, after Dan went to jail. But the members can still use the franking to send letters. Peter Hoekstra, R-MI, is the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a conservative from the Block-Headed Dutch region of Michigan . I lived there for a few years when the earth was young, and I think he has the seat that Gerald Ford once occupied before he was un-elected to the Presidency. He took word-processor in hand to defend the Administration's limited briefings to the senior-most members of the Congress on the collection plan. They call that select group the “Gang of Eight.” Hoekstra addressed his letter to the Ranking Member of his Committee, Jane Harman, D-CA. He probably could have just talked to her in the chamber where they both go, periodically, but this is not about communicating. It is about correspondence. He slammed her for allegedly changing her position on the issue. That was in response to Harman's letter to President Bush on Wednesday, maintaining that "the 1947 National Security Act requires that the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees be informed of the NSA program. By briefing only the Republican and Democratic leaders of both Houses and of the committees, the Administration violated the law." In Hoekstra's letter to Harman, he said that he was "surprised and somewhat bewildered" by her letter to the President. He said the briefings were in full compliance with the Act, which he maintains states that Committees should be informed of intelligence activities "with due regard” for the need to protect sources and methods. I had to brief Ms Harman on another issue a while back, and I can certainly understand why the Chairman is "surprised and bewildered." I know I was. But according to the Chairman, she had not previously complained about the briefings, and that he found her letter to the president "completely incongruent" with her previous position, which apparently had been fully supportive of the program and its oversight. Meanwhile, a letter from John Conyers, D-MI, co-signed by twenty-seven of his fellow House Democrats, crossed in the mail. It asked the President for specific information about the NSA program, including whether Congressional communications and those of journalists were intercepted. With the Abramoff affair still yet to play out, it strikes me as only prudent for them to find out. Conyers also asked for copies of all legal opinions on the spying program; the numbers of Americans singled out; and the names of agencies getting the information the agency collected. Meanwhile, out at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade , Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, who replaced Hayden as the Director, also needed to get some mail out. He does not have the franking privilege, so he used e-mail like the rest of us. According to the press, he sent two e-mails to the workforce, including one that began: "Rest assured that any operation, regardless of sensitivity, is conducted within the law and in the best interest of our nation." He added that the program, whatever it is, remains classified, regardless of what the Congress says. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |