Thread: Pat Buchanan: Will Heads Roll for the Stuxnet Leak?

Will Heads Roll for the Stuxnet Leak?



Pat Buchanan
Jun 12, 2012

Within days of SEAL Team Six's killing of Osama on that midnight mission in Pakistan, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, reading all about the raid in the press, went to the White House to tell President Obama's national security adviser pungently to "shut the (bleep) up."
Leaked secrets of that raid may have led to the imprisonment for 33 years of a Pakistani doctor who helped us locate bin Laden.
Yet, according to Judicial Watch, the White House has been providing Hollywood with details of the raid for a movie that will, we may be sure, heroize our commander in chief. More troubling are two recent stories in The New York Times.
One, by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, describes how, at meetings in the Situation Room, Obama examines "baseball cards" of al-Qaida targets in Pakistan and Yemen and decides on the "kill list" for drone strikes.
Most explosive was the June 1 story by David Sanger, who wrote of the origins and operation of a secret U.S-Israeli cyberwar strike on Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. The Stuxnet virus we introduced into Natanz put 1,000 centrifuges out of action.
These security leaks raise moral, strategic and legal issues.
Does Obama alone decide in the War on Terror who dies, where and when, whom it is permissible to terminate as collateral damage, who gets a reprieve? What are the criteria that this, our Caesar, has settled upon for who gets whacked? Do we have a right to know?
And there is blowback to actions like these. Asked why he would target civilians, the Times Square bomber replied that U.S. drones do not spare civilians in Pakistan.
Is it wise to have it leaked that President Obama is routinely ordering assassinations? Have we forgotten our history?
After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, we discovered that the CIA had been plotting to kill Fidel Castro, and Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The Kennedys were "running a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean," Lyndon Johnson allegedly said.
Men targeted for assassination in their countries may feel justified in reciprocating and assassinating Americans in our country.
As for the malware, or Stuxnet virus, introduced into Natanz, was it wise to use this powerful and secret weapon against a plant that is under international inspection and enriches uranium only to 5 percent?
We may have disrupted Natanz for months, but we also revealed to Iran and the world our cyberwar capabilities. And we became the first nation to use cyberwar weapons on a country with which we are not at war.
If we have a right to attack Iran's nuclear facilities like Natanz and Bushehr that are under U.N. supervision, does Iran have a right to attack our nuclear plants, like Three Mile Island, with cyberwar viruses they create?
We have now alerted technologically advanced nations like Russia and China to our capabilities and impelled them to get cracking on their own cyberwar weapons, both offensive and defensive.
After President Truman informed him at Potsdam of our atom bomb, Joseph Stalin went home and ordered Soviet scientists to replicate the U.S. success. By 1949, far sooner than expected, Stalin had the bomb.
Sanger describes how this "highly classified program," code-named "Olympic Games," was begun in the Bush years, how the worm was inserted in Natanz, and how it escaped from the centrifuges to outside computers and the world.
He quotes the president's dismayed reaction: "Should we shut this thing down?" Sanger implies that he spoke with "participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games."
Obama seems outraged by such a suggestion: "The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive."
Fair enough. But presidential meetings are held in the Situation Room because they involve the most sensitive security secrets, and Olympic Games was, as Sanger relates, "a highly classified" program.
Whom did Sanger get all this from? Who leaked and why?
For this is far more serious than the leak that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA, which triggered a special prosecutor and got Dick Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, indicted and convicted.
Pvt. Bradley Manning faces a life sentence for divulging security secrets to Wikileaks. What did he do that the leakers of the Stuxnet secrets did not do?
John McCain alleges that the leaking of security secrets -- on how SEAL Team Six got Osama, on the Stuxnet virus that ravaged the Natanz plant, on the president ordering up drone strikes on a "kill list" of al-Qaida operatives -- is politically motivated.
Purpose: Paint the president as a ruthless and relentless warrior against America's enemies.
Whatever the purpose, the leaks appear to be breaches of national security and violations of federal law, and two U.S. attorneys are investigating.
It is not improbable that officials on Obama's national security team, if not White House aides, will soon be addressing a federal grand jury.

Will Heads Roll for the Stuxnet Leak? - Pat Buchanan - Townhall Conservative Columnists

Squealing Versus Killing

Judge Andrew Napolitano
Jun 14, 2012

If you are still listening to those in the political class who are falling over each other to condemn leaks from the government to the media, you'd think the leaks had revealed private information in which the public has no legitimate interest, or perhaps a planned secret government mission to rescue innocents. Neither is the case.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress, most of them from the House and Senate intelligence committees, have blasted the White House for leaking to The New York Times and others the existence of President Obama's secret kill list and his cyber-warfare against Iran. According to those doing the blasting, the leaks were made in order to bolster the president's war-on-terror credentials with voters in anticipation of an onslaught against those credentials by Gov. Mitt Romney in the coming fall presidential campaign.

So, who has violated the Constitution and federal law, who has caused more harm and who has performed more of a disservice to the nation: those who leaked the truth to the media, or the president, who caused death and destruction among those he hates and fears?

We already know the basic facts, as the White House has denied none of this. The president meets every Tuesday morning with a select group of military, intelligence, national security and, occasionally, political advisers and reviews the background and photos of persons in foreign countries whom he hates or fears, some of whom are Americans. He then personally decides whom among them to kill. Then he dispatches civilian agents of the government, no doubt the CIA, to do the killing using drones. He uses the CIA to do this because if he used the military, federal law requires public reporting of that use and, eventually, congressional approval. Some of the killings have taken place in Yemen, a country that has welcomed them, and some in Pakistan, a country that has condemned them. We are at war with neither.

We also know that the president has directed the CIA to use technology to disrupt the workings of computers in Iran on a grand scale. The government of Iran consists of a gaggle of religious fanatics and crackpots who have threatened the U.S. and Israel until they are blue in the face, but these misguided authoritarians have not harmed the U.S. or any of our allies. And of course, we are not at war with Iran.

Nevertheless, the president, with the knowledge of certain members of Congress but without the consent of the House and the Senate as the law requires, destabilized and caused physical harm and financial loss to millions of innocent people in Iran -- physicians, hospital administrators, businesspeople, academics, pro-Western students, shopkeepers -- when major computer servers there were immobilized. Just imagine the chaos -- and the political reaction -- should Iranian agents cause all that computer damage here.

The president is evading federal law on the use of the military by having the now-paramilitary CIA kill people in foreign countries with drones and disrupt a foreign population with a cyber-war. And he is violating the Constitution and federal law by starting wars on his own. But the loudest and most sanctimonious of politicians are not demanding that the president follow the Constitution and the laws he has sworn to uphold. Rather, they are demanding to know who told the media about the president's war making.

Which is ultimately more harmful to freedom: that the president on his own kills and maims and destroys, or that some people in our own government who have greater fidelity to the Constitution than loyalty to an out-of-control presidency -- and who are protected by law when they reveal government crimes -- tell us what the president is up to? What kind of politicians complain about truthful revelations of unconstitutional behavior by the government, but not about death and destruction, and, let's face it, criminal abuse of power by the president? Only cynical power-hungry politicians who have disdain for the Constitution they have sworn to uphold could do this with a straight face.

The president's use of drones and cyber-warfare to kill people and to destabilize a foreign population, without a formal declaration of war, is the moral equivalent of an illegal war. When President Nixon started a war on his own in Cambodia, Congress enacted legislation over his veto to prevent that from happening again. Yet, the members of Congress who are demanding to know who told the truth to the media about President Obama's war making apparently agree with his unlawful use of the war-making power he has stolen from them.

How base our culture has become when the hunt for truth tellers is more compelling than the cessation of unlawful government killing. If the president can fight private wars and start public ones on his own, and the public is induced to focus on those who have told us what he is doing and not on his misdeeds themselves, and Congress remains a potted plant or willing dupe, the president can get away with anything.

Squealing Versus Killing - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Townhall Conservative Columnists