Mrs. Clinton’s Intelligence ISIS was more careful with its sensitive communications than Hillary was. By William McGurn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mrs-clintons-intelligence-1448325302
Here’s a post-Paris question:
Will America really elect as president someone who, as secretary of state, was more reckless communicating sensitive information than the Islamic State terrorists who pulled off their bloody attack?
The question has become more urgent now that Hillary Clinton has vowed to put an “immediate intelligence surge” at the top of her security agenda. Leave aside Mrs. Clinton’s belated embrace of the word “surge,” or that her call for an intelligence surge against ISIS is her way of not calling for a troop surge. In so doing, she inadvertently raises the question why, so many years after 9/11, we don’t have the intel we should.
“If you are going to lead the intelligence community as president, it’s crucial that you develop a reputation for calling it straight and not playing to the narrative,” says James Woolsey, Bill Clinton’s first CIA director. “For much of the intelligence community, the jury’s still out on her.”
Mr. Woolsey is being kind. Though Mrs. Clinton has not been as publicly antagonistic as either Mr. Obama or (more recently) the Snowden wing of the Republican Party, when she ends up taking a position on intel, almost always it owes more to the politics of the moment rather than the perils.
Consider Mrs. Clinton’s response to the two most prominent efforts to hinder our intelligence community. The first has to do with the National Security Agency, and especially its program to listen in on conversations with suspected terrorists originating overseas.
In many ways, the info NSA collects from these conversations is the crown jewel of our intel operations. In 2005 when the New York Times exposed the program, Mrs. Clinton was still a senator. Rhetorically her reaction has been to issue bland platitudes about balancing American intelligence needs with American liberties.
Her vote is another story. In 2008 a bipartisan deal was struck to allow the NSA program to continue and grant immunity to telecom companies that had assisted the government in post-9/11 surveillance. Even then-Sen. Barack Obama accepted the deal, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But not Mrs. Clinton. At a decisive political moment, she voted against renewing one of the NSA’s most effective anti-terror tools. The bill’s restrictions and oversight, she explained, did not go far enough.
The other major campaign was against the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. In his original run for president, Mr. Obama called the interrogations “torture” and said he’d ban them. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, took the view that there might be rare circumstances (i.e., the ticking-time-bomb) where a president might authorize torture.
But she later backed down. When moderator Tim Russert invoked the ticking time bomb during a 2007 Democratic debate and asked if that justified torture, Mrs. Clinton now rejected it categorically, saying “it cannot be American policy, period.” Seven years later, again with her eye on the White House, she said she was “proud to have been a part of the Obama administration that banned illegal renditions and brutal interrogations.”
But she also stressed to a Council on Foreign Relations audience that she didn’t support prosecuting those who had carried out the interrogations. How inspiring for the CIA to know Mrs. Clinton will not send them to jail though she considers them torturers.
Come to think of it, why her call for an intelligence surge now? Where was the call back when we missed the rise of ISIS and Russia’s plans to invade Crimea, not to mention Bashar Assad’s resilience in Syria? Does Mrs. Clinton’s idea of an intelligence surge really come down to having more “Arabic speakers with deep expertise in the region”?
Finally, Mrs. Clinton implies leaders will do the right thing if only they have the right info. Her own record demonstrates this is not true. Only last month we learned that, on the night of the Libyan attacks, Mrs. Clinton emailed her daughter that “two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al-Qaeda like group.” When she spoke in public, however, she falsely blamed it on an anti-Muslim video.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the air was thick with cries that “we didn’t connect the dots.” In response, George W. Bush put in place programs America needed, and stood up for those who carried them out.
Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has come down on the side of those making it more difficult to collect the dots. Something to think about the next time we are lectured about the need to upgrade our intel apparatus from the lady who as secretary of state used a homebrew, private email server highly vulnerable to foreign hackers for all her official business.
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