What a pack of sanctimonious hypocrites, including Nason.

Rockefeller was evidently Nason’s star witness. But if Rockefeller was that upset about the surveillance why didn’t he go public? After all, it was Rockefeller, along with Dick Durbin, Carl Levin and Ron Wyden, who deliberately betrayed a highly secret spy satellite program. So what stopped him from spilling the beans on this program?

Well, Nason could, I suppose, argue that Rockefeller had at least sent a letter of protest to Cheney. No he didn’t. What he did was write a letter to himself which, in his own words, “had been sealed and secured in the offices of the Senate intelligence committee”. How this amounts to sending a letter of protest to Mr Cheney is a mystery that only Mr Nason appears able to solve.

My take on the matter would be the same as that of any sensible man. For some reason Rockefeller thought the program would be exposed. Therefore he took the precaution of taking out a little insurance so he could make the risible assertion that he was never really in favour of the program. Any Republican who tried a stunt like this would be ridiculed out of town. But then Rockefeller is not a Republican and Nason is not a real journalist.

Proving that you can’t keep a determined political bigot down, Nason decided to have another go at Bush in Wiretaps vital and within law: Bush, 3 January. It was the same old tedious stuff from the New York Slimes about warrantless searches, despite the fact that numerous authorities have argued that presidents do have this authority. For example, Victoria Toensing, a former assistant attorney general, categorically stated that

The Clinton administration did carry out that authority when they went into Aldrich Ames’ house without a warrant, and they argued before the House, Jamie Gorelick did, that they had the inherent –– the president had the inherent constitutional authority to do so.

Toensing further stressed:

Well, I can tell you what Jamie Gorelick said before the House committee. She said, “We relied on the inherent authority of the president to conduct warrantless searches”.

These statements were made by telephone to CNN’s The Situation Room, 21 December 2005, in response to Jeffrey Toobin’s assertions that were designed to mislead the audience with respect to presidential authority.

So how did all these facts manage to escape the ever diligent Mr Nason, as if I didn’t know.

Unfortunately Nason is not the only one on Murdoch’s Australian who is trying to smear Bush by stoking a phony spy scanda. Geoff Elliott, the paper’s so-called Washington correspondent, was another who felt the need to try and pollute the waters further (Bush under fire for spying on citizens, 19 December 2005).

Doing his damnedest to blacken Bush, Elliot insinuated that the President had broken the law and violated Americans’ constitutional right by secretly authorising “telephone taps on Americans without court warrants…”

Interesting enough, in the third paragraph of his article Elliot basically admitted that he, like Nason, was taking his lead from the Slimes. Beginning to brim with the kind of mock indignation that seems to come naturally to lefty journalists Elliott told us that “there has been a sense of outrage among politicians in Congress, most of whom read about it for the first time in the newspaper”.

Outrage my foot. What we got was a bunch of two-faced Dems faking righteous anger for the benefit of the party’s pathological Bush-hating loony supporters. The ones sensible Americans call the “kook fringe”. As for most congressmen not knowing about the program, what in heavens name is reprehensible or sinister about that? Telling them would be the same as telling the terrorists. Yet it seems that Mr Nason would have us believe that there was something ominous in not informing the likes of the Castro-loving Charlie Rangel about the NSA’s program.

Although Elliott acknowledged that Bush had briefed congressional leaders a number of times, which would make them complicit in any lawbreaking, something that also eluded Mr Nason’s razor-like intelligence, he asserted that the issue raised “the spectre of a secret surveillance force operating in the US with no judicial oversight, many congressmen and legal experts are saying the President may have broken the law”.

And who does he quote in support of this view? Why the Bush-hating Russell Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who pompously declared that “he’s President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for”. This would be hilarious for the fact that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American lives have been put at risk by Feingold and Elliott’s ideological soul mates at the Treason Times.

But as I have already pointed out with respect to the other Dem clowns, if Feingold is so outraged why didn’t he object to Clinton’s spying? And why didn’t Elliott ask him? (Just kidding, folks). Like Nason, Elliott also likes to omit facts that might challenge the credibility of Bush critics.

For example, Feingold is a leftwinger with a strong antipathy for national security. In December 2002 this creep co-signed a letter in with John Conyers and Teddy Kennedy demanding that the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System be closed down, even though it had caught 300 criminals and a number of terrorists. What upset this trio of patriots is that the program required that male immigrants from countries known to harbour terrorists should register with the INS. (Kennedy sabotages national security: Why did he do it?)

Elliott went on to demonstrate his commitment to the truth and the public’s right to know by quoting Patrick Leahy as saying:

The Bush administration seems to believe it is above the law. Our Government must follow the laws and respect the constitution while it protects Americans' security and liberty.

This is the same patriot who supported the Marxist-Leninist takeover of Central America, who opposed domestic anti-terrorism legislation after the September 11 attacks, and who in in 2000 blocked intelligence reforms that might have prevented the attacks. He was also forced to resign from Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking information about a future bombing run on Ghadafy that President Reagan had planned. (The sort of politician that Elliott approvingly quotes to support his own ideological prejudices is very revealing).

Nowhere in Elliott’s slimy hit piece was the slightest indication that President Bush did in fact have the authority to order anti-terrorist surveillance.

Not to be outdone by Nason, Elliott took another shot at Bush the following day in Bush focuses on Iraq as spy row grows in which he categorically stated that even in the case of surveillance of terrorists and their accomplices court warrants are required by law. Ergo, Bush is a criminal

In Support of this implicit conclusion he quoted Arlen Specter, while ignoring Toensing, who said it was “inexcusable to have spying on people in the US without court surveillance, in violation of our law”. It never occurred to the bigoted Elliott that Specter could be as ignorant of the law as himself. He then returned to the tiresome and hypocritical Feingold for further support, whose contribution was to accuse Bush of making up the law –– an accusation he never threw at Clinton.

As an apparent warning to Americans of how dangerous Bush really is, Elliott gave us Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, saying: “We have to make sure Big Brother doesn’t take over this country”. But where was Reid’s concern about Big Brother when Clinton was president?

Michael Gawenda, the loathsome Washington correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald was, as expected, every bit as bad as Nason and Elliott. As I consider it pointless to continually go over the same ground, it will suffice to give the titles of his articles.

Ghost of Nixon helps rebuilds the presidency, 26 December 26 2005.

Bush lashes out over leak, 21 December 21 2005

Secret bugging vital to war on terror, Bush says, 19 December 2005

What was particularly dishonest about these so-called journalists was their refusal to give space to anyone who could provide a legal argument for the President’s surveillance program. They had obviously taken on board the New York Times bigoted rationale that such programs are acceptable –– but only so long as Democrats do it. What else can we conclude given that it called NSA’s Echelon electronic surveillance program a “necessity”.

The more I learn about our journalists the more disgusted I become.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor

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