Gen. Hayden - for the Record

In this excerpt of a speech that General Hayden, the President's new CIA director, gave back in January of this year, he points out what the NSA program acutally does and what it can't do.
Congress is aware of all of the limitations but still wants to use this non-story as a club to try and beat down the Bush administration. Will the American people fall for this line of disinformation, only time will tell.

It hurts our national security though, of this there is no doubt, but that has never stopped the Marxist Democrats from trying to destroy our government and I'm sure they will use it in the future as well to try and regain power.

Remember, to the liberal Marxist Democrats, nothing is sacred, absolutely nothing.


So let me make this clear. When you're talking to your daughter at state college, this program cannot intercept your conversations. And when she takes a semester abroad to complete her Arabic studies, this program will not intercept your communications.

Let me emphasize one more thing that this program is not and, look, I know how hard it is to write a headline that accurate and short and grabbing. But we really should shoot for all three accurate, short and grabbing. I don't think domestic spying makes it. One end of any call targeted under this program is always outside the United States.

I've flown a lot in this country, and I've taken literally hundreds of domestic flights. I have never boarded a domestic flight in the United States of America and landed in Waziristan. In the same way and I'm speaking illustratively here now, this is just an example if NSA had intercepted al Qaeda Ops Chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Karachi talking to Mohamed Atta in Laurel, Maryland, in say, July of 2001 if NSA had done that, and the results had been made public, I'm convinced that the crawler on all the 7 by 24 news networks would not have been NSA domestic spying.

John B. Dwyer 5 11 06