I haven't done a good fisking in a long time. This anti-Bush tirade by former Senator Gary Hart is defintiely worth the time and effort. I will excerpt the parts I find objectionable below. More proof that Democrats and their leaders just aren't to be taken seriously. I am still waiting for an analysis that is heavier on facts than on emotional outbursts.

Intelligence abuse déjà vu

The Senate had impaneled the committee because of increasing reports of abuse of authority by the country's myriad intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration as well as previous administrations.

"As well as previous administrations"? What the hell is that? It must be in the Democrat style manual that one should never put a bad word like "abuse" and "Johnson" or "Kennedy" in the same sentence.

In some cases, the intelligence services even turned violent. The CIA, for instance, conducted the infamous Phoenix program that resulted in the systematic assassination of thousands of Vietnamese villagers accused of collaborating with the Viet Cong. This was the 1970s version of Abu Ghraib.

Wow. Do I even have to even explain how these are not similar? Thousands of governement approved extrajudicial assassinations versus a handful of prisoners that were abused by rogue prison guards? And don't even give me any of that "Rumsfeld atmosphere" crap because 99.9% of our military prison guards have not seen it fit to violently abuse their charges.

Our committee's work resulted in many reforms. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required special intelligence courts to approve national security wiretaps. The Bush administration, however, has found that statute inconvenient and, predictably, has ignored it.

And the Clinton administration. And the Carter administration. When we were not at war.

Again to support the CIA, our panel laid the groundwork for the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act that prevented identification of CIA operatives. This was the act that now appears to have been violated by at least half of the Bush White House in its demented efforts to punish Ambassador Joe Wilson by "outing" his undercover wife.

A prolonged investigation by a special prosecutor which led to exactly zero indictments for illegally "outing" someone isn't enough to prevent the claim that "half of the White House" was involved in a said "demented" scheme. Um, can you say...slander? And for the last time, she was NOT undercover.

If there was one lesson all of us who served on the Church Committee learned, it was that there are no secrets, that everything comes out and that the sacrifice of liberty is almost never justified by improved security.

Why the use of the modifier "almost" Senator? Is it so impossible to believe that the extremely limited "troublesome" surveillance that took place falls into that category when we're fighting an enemy that we know works inside our own borders, wears no uniforms and needs very few people to kill thousands of your fellow citizens? I'd like to know what exceptions he thinks there are.

It must finally understand that our security cannot be ensured by sacrifice of our own liberties.

The Patriot Act and other presidential directives are meant to provide additional paths for the gathering of intelligence, NOT to restrict anyone's liberties. There's a difference. An analogy (bad perhaps) - giving highway cops radar guns does not take away our liberties - it helps the police to determine if people are breaking the law.

All of these wonderful reforms that Senator Hart worked on took place before the actions of a few dozen men could be a real threat to national security, and before the invention of laptop computers, cell phones, satellite phones, portable phones, e-mail, etc. Congress should be coming up with novel ways to improve our intelligence gathering, not fossilizing reforms from a different era.

The Church Committee that the Senator took part in, did an amazing job in detailing and categorizing abuses that seem absolutely incredible by today's standards. Comentary on the specific policies that he finds offensive, backed up with examples, would have been much more meaningful than painting the Bush administration with such a broad brush. Reading the Church report, Bush still appears like a saint in comparison to his predecessors.