Al Franken Explains It All for You

Here is Ralph Kostant's latest contribution to this ever-grateful blog:
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From the Al Franken/Thomas Oliphant exchange on Al Franken'’s Air America radio program this morning (7/7/2005):

Franken: This is where I am going to disagree with you, because this seems to be your thrust about what happened today. And I think that, and I buy this, and maybe I am naive, that you gotta bat 1,000 and they just got to bat 1. You know, and I don't know what's been stopped and I don't know any way we can know what's been stopped. We don't know. We had Jane Mayer on talking about the abuse at Gitmo, and there's no way to know because they are so secretive, this is the most secretive administration, we don't know, they say, they've saved American lives from their interrogations there. We don't know that. We don't know if it has cost us in terms of getting information, because it is the wrong way to get information.

Oliphant: That's right, and because of Congress now we have no way to really rigorously oversee what the intelligence community does so we can come to an evaluation about its effectiveness.

Franken actually was making sense, for two or three sentences, until he started in on Gitmo. Then he and Oliphant prescribe just what we need to make our country'’s intelligence effort against Islamic militants more effective: —to have the likes of Franken and Oliphant "“rigorously oversee"” the "“so secretive"” intelligence community on Air America Radio! As for Congress, it was the Church Committee'’s hearings in the 1970s, and the resulting legislation restricting CIA activities, and inserting firewalls between the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence, that contributed to our lack of preparedness against Al Qeda, and the vulnerability that permitted the 9/11 attack. God save us from the reformers!

Ralph B. Kostant