NY Times Won't Be Satisfied Until All Our Secrets Are Out

The NY Times is at it again - publishing classified security operations conducted by the government:

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has admitted that the US military and CIA have been spying on the financial dealings of Americans -- intelligence gathering normally authorized only by civilian policing agencies.

The New York Times broke the story overnight, reporting that the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency had been using "national security letters" to obtain the banking and credit records of Americans and foreigners suspected of terrorist activities in the United States.

The US military and the CIA have long been restricted in their spying activities inside the United States and are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work in the country.

But Cheney confirmed the main outlines of the report and defended the Pentagon and CIA activities as legal and necessary to protect military installations inside the United States.

"This is a dramatic story, but I think it's important for people to understand here this is a legitimate security effort that's been underway for a long time and it does not represent a new departure from the standpoint of our efforts to protect ourselves against terrorist attack," he said on Fox News Sunday.

"The defense department gets involved because we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets," he said.

He called the spying "a perfectly legitimate activity" that the military and CIA had authority to carry out going back "three or four decades" and more recently confirmed in the Patriot Act adopted following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

"It doesn't violate people's civil rights, and it's an institution that receives one of these national security letters disagrees with it, they're free to go to court to try to stop its execution," he said.

Of course, the real problems are the government officials who have decided that it is their job to stymie the administration at every point by leaking these reports to the media. I hope we're one day able to find out who they are so they can be held responsible for the damage they cause.