Frank Rich identifies the true traitors in this country

It's about time someone came out and said it:

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Rich also does us the public service of pointing out that Michael Hayden, Bush's nominee to succeed the hapless Porter Goss as head of the CIA, intercepted an actual Al Qaeda message on September 10, 2001, which said, "Tomorrow is zero hour". Now, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that if you get a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6 which reads, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.", and then the NSA intercepts a message reading "Tomorrow is zero hour" on September 10, the chances are pretty good that something is going to happen on September 11, and when it does, YOU DON'T SIT IN A CLASSROOM FOR SEVEN MINUTES READING 'MY PET GOAT'.

Or maybe you do....if the plan to let the attacks play out is going just as it should be.

Let us not forget that:

• Newsweek reported on 9/24/01 that a group of top Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans for the next day on September 10, 2001;
  
• A number of business leaders of companies located in the World Trade Center, including the CEO of Fiduciary Trust, were instead at a meeting hosted by Warren Buffett at the Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. Now, why was Warren Buffett hosting a meeting at an air force base in the first place....and why was it at a base with an underground command center -- the same base to which George W. Bush flew later that day?
  
• The FAA stepped up security measures around novelist and perennial Islamic target Salman Rushdie in the days prior to September 11, 2001
  

....and many other facts that just don't add up to an Administration taken completely by surprise.

Frank Rich is right -- this administration is LOUSY with traitors. And someday, when future generations (if there are any) sift through the rubble of what's left after the Bushistas get through witht he world, they will find the truth about these people. We won't live to see it, but the truth will eventually come out.