Sunday, February 5, 2006

The New York Review of Books: 'The Biggest Secret'

The New York Review of Books: 'The Biggest Secret': "far from saving 'thousands of lives,' as claimed by Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly."

And, that would be the spark, which started a firestorm, should such a spark be struck.

[Metaphors become cliches so rapidly, but cliches never seem to erode; why the hell am I using metaphors like "striking a spark" and "tinderbox" (see the earlier post) more than a hundred years after the invention of safety matches?]

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