Here's what I thought you'd like to hear about today:

1. What Was Lost - by the disclosure of the terrorist financial tracking system?


2. What Did Bob Novak Know, and When Did He Know It? - The tell-all on Fox News

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What Was Lost?

C-SPAN carried a hearing this week of a congressional subcommittee. As C-SPAN describes it:

Rep. Sue Kelly (R-NY) chairs a House Financial Service Subcmte. on Oversight & Investigations hearing on the terrorist finance tracking program.

I'm going to play three clips from the hearing. One is from Representitive Kelly's opening remarks, where the chairman of the subcommittee, which usually meets to review banking regulations and other details of the financial industry, discusses the impact of media disclosures of classified information, and how they must be balanced with the need for oversight.

Play clip.

Note her reference to Federalist #51. I don't have a clue what Madison's Federalist #51 is, so I looked it up. Here is the opening, in which Madison contemplates the concept of the balance of power for the public good:

TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. Without presuming to undertake a full development of this important idea, I will hazard a few general observations, which may perhaps place it in a clearer light, and enable us to form a more correct judgment of the principles and structure of the government planned by the convention.

... it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others. ...In the constitution of the judiciary department in particular, it might be inexpedient to insist rigorously on the principle: first, because peculiar qualifications being essential in the members, the primary consideration ought to be to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications; secondly, because the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them.

It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments [salary] annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal.

And he goes on from there. The point is that there should be separate branches with the ability to control one another. This is what the congressman means when she refers to the oversight her committee is undertaking. Fair enough.

After this introduction, each of the committee members bloviate for a few minutes, although it might seem like an hour for some. Then the witness, Stuart Levey, Under Secretary, Terrorism and Financial Intelligence U.S. Department of the Treasury gives his opening remarks. They are brief, and I will play them in their entirety now:

Play clip.

Betsy Newmark at Betsy's Page writes on his testimony:

Zap! So much for this supercilious claim that, of course the terrorists knew all about this program and so the NYT story was nothing new. If they knew all about it, why was our guy in the Treasury Department seeing something every single day of the past two years that came from a lead from this program? Sounds like the terrorists didn't all know about it, did they?

And the other thing that makes me hoot is see all these congressmen and women huff and puff that they weren't informed. Well, they're on the Financial Services Subcommittee. The administration informed those on the Intelligence Committee. These guys are just angry that they're not in the loop. It's all about turf and their sense of self-importance. If we can't have a small, limited group of congressmen be the ones informed about very top secret operations and have to tell everyone who might feel slighted about not being informed, then we might as well give up all hope for keeping anything secret.

I agree with Betsy. Listen to Barney Frank, as a typical example of the huffing and puffing.

Play clip.

He asks why he was not briefed until the program was about to be disclosed by the NY Times. One can only assume that an earlier disclosure was not done because they didn't trust him to keep a secret. Sounds like a good policy to me. They briefed him when he could no longer do damage to the program because the NY Times was about to publish the sources and methods.

Speaking of the disclosure of classified information, the next section is about:

What Did Bob Novak Know, and When Did He Know It?

He appeared Wednesday night on Brit Hume's Fox News Special Report to review how he came to publish the first account of Joe Wilson's wife's name in his column. You could hear lefty heads explode all over the world at the idea that Rove was not his primary source, only a confirmation, and where he found Plame's name. Thanks to the Media Blog on National Review Online for the video.

Play clip.

I don't purport to know all the minutia about the Plame affair, and the minutia are really minute in this story. But I do know that everyone, especially Joe Wilson, has been expecting the frog marching of Karl Rove out of the White House in chains for his disclosure of supersecret spy Valerie Plame. Only lefty newspapers like the Washington Post and the NY Times are allowed to disclose classified information, as every FireDogLake and Media Matters reader knows, and only when it is in the "public interest". The "public interest" excuse is rather the same as "interesting to the public" don't you think? Sounds like a rather low bar to me. And the name of a CIA analyst who sent her husband on an African boondoggle to drink tea in Niger? Why it needs to be guarded as a national secret. Even if it is available in Who's Who in America for six years,, as Kevin Aylward at Wizbang noticed a year ago.

The relevant text is "m. Valerie Elise Plame, Apr. 3, 1998," which not only appears in the 2003 edition, but ALL editions from 1999-2005!

Some secret. Say it ain't so, Joe!