The Curtain Is Pulled Back

Once the culture of fear yielded no scared Democrats scurrying to do their bidding, the White House literally has no idea what to do.

A day after warning that potentially critical terrorism intelligence was being lost because Congress had not finished work on a controversial espionage law, the U.S. attorney general and the national intelligence director said Saturday that the government was receiving the information -- at least temporarily.

On Friday evening, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell had said in an unusually blunt letter to Congress that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers had not yet acted on the administration's proposal for the wiretapping law.

But within hours of sending that letter, administration officials told lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees that they had prevailed upon all of the telecommunications companies to continue cooperating with the government's requests for information while negotiations with Congress continue.

A statement describing the change was released Saturday.

They're playing with a deck bereft of aces. The only thing they have is fear. When it doesn't work, they try to scare even more, but the obviousness of the lie forced this unprecedented backtrack.

All of this says to me that the next President needs to open up the books on the Bush Administration, and that we cannot as a nation be truly healed until that happens. The intelligence leadership has been caught in an enormous lie, making false claims about lost intelligence gathering for purely political reasons. This cannot possibly be an isolated incident. And indeed, many of the officials and officers in the civil service who directed these lies and misstatements will still be working in the government under a potential Democratic Administration. It needs to be extremely clear from the very beginning that they must be rooted out, expunged and turned over to the legal system for a determination. It should be a key part of the Democratic nominee's platform. Only then can we truly "turn the page," as the front-runner is likely to say.