Birdman Biggles

"Birdman" as in "Up In The Air, Junior" and "Biggles" as in "Flies Undone."

Right.

Anyway, when the news broke last Friday about Porter Goss resigning as head of the CIA, at least one network felt it necessary to break into regular programming . . . in essence to let ABC's stable of talking heads waste 15 minutes speculating about what it all might mean. That is not news, people! An on-screen crawler reporting the resignation would have sufficed, thank you very much.

Breaking into regular programming is supposed to be reserved for really important things, like presidential assassinations, assassination attempts, and airplanes being flown deliberately into buildings. I didn't need to spend time on a Friday afternoon listening to George Stephanopolous and others dither. They didn't have anything to say. There wasn't anything to say. I miss Peter Jennings. He'd have talked some sense into the powers that be at ABC News.

OK, I'll fess up. I'm also mad about it because it pre-empted the last 10 minutes of "All My Children." Hey, everyone knows that about the only time anything really happens on a soap opera is during the last 10 minutes on Friday afternoon. The viewers thus spend the weekend agonizing over the interim cliffhangers set up on Friday and will doubtless come back the following Monday to see how everything resolves itself.

"What does any of this have to do with Birdman Biggles?" you ask. It has to do with Dubya's Monday nomination of US Air Force Four Star General Michael Hayden to take over Goss's post. Unlike others, I am not upset that an active duty Armed Forces general may become the head of a civilian government agency. Our system has been designed to cope with that. Hayden still must answer to a civilian Commander-in-Chief. Besides, other active duty personnel have served in the same or similar capacities in the past. [Or so say the media. I confess that my knowledge in this particular area of history is spotty at best.--Ed.] Furthermore, Hayden apparently has pledged to retire if that's what it will take to end such objections to his appointment to the CIA dictatorship--um, directorship.

No, my problem with Hayden's nomination has to do with one of his acts while heading the National Security Agency, to wit: he's the architect of the warrantless wiretap program about which I previously have complained (in this blog among other places). In terms of knowledge and experience about intelligence-gathering, Hayden is quite qualified to take over the helm at the CIA. But is he in terms of temperament and understanding of how the US government is supposed to work?

I think not. His justifications for the warrantless wiretap program ignore our entire constitutional system of checks and balances, place secrecy ahead of every other American interest, and therefore are entirely unnecessary. Under the laws as they presently exist, the NSA has up to 72 hours after it starts a wiretap to get a warrant--from a secret court set up expressly for that purpose. Why not just obey the law instead of claiming extraconstitutional executive power? There's no good reason. I do not trust anyone who says that no one independent of the decision to start a wiretap needs to evaluate it, even if it's already been in place for 3 days. People who fall for the snake oil salesman's "Trust me" pitch tend to get what they deserve. Heck, Ronald Reagan himself said, "Trust--but verify."

If our tactics are no better or no different from those who attack us, we lose the moral high ground. And if we implement those tactics because we must if we are to survive, we lose all claim to being a beacon of freedom for the world to emulate.

When our ultimate justification is expediency, how can we in turn claim that no man is above the law? It is important to maintain difficult principles in our actions, not just with our words, or else we are merely blowing more hot air into an already dangerously globally-warmed world.