On Sunday, CQ reported that the NSA had wiretapped Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), listening in on a call in which she apparently offered a quid pro quo to a lobbyist group. Harman has vigorously denied the reports. Today, she appeared on MSNBC to express her shock and outrage that her phone calls were listened to, saying she was “disappointed” that the U.S. could have allowed such “a gross abuse of power”:

HARMAN: I’m just very disappointed that my country — I’m an American citizen just like you are — could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I’m one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, but I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I’m thinking about others who have no bully pulpit and may not be aware, as I was not, that right now somewhere, someone’s listening in on their conversations, and they’re innocent Americans.

Watch it:

Harman’s anger seems a bit disingenuous, considering that she was one of the earliest supporters of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. When the practice was revealed by the New York Times in 2005, she defended it as “essential,” though admitted she was “concerned” about its scope:

“I have been briefed since 2003 on a highly classified NSA foreign collection program that targeted Al Qaeda. I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities,” Harman said. “Like many Americans, I am deeply concerned by reports that this program in fact goes far beyond the measures to target Al Qaeda about which I was briefed.”

In fact, in 2004 she “urged that The [New York] Times not publish the article” revealing Bush’s program.

Indeed, she issued a press release in 2007 specifically highlighting that the updated FISA bill she approved of would fully allow warrantless wiretapping:

This bill does a good job — a far better job than the bill reported last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee. … This legislation arms our intelligence professionals with the ability to listen to foreign targets — without a warrant — to uncover plots that threaten US national security. The bill also protects the Constitutional rights of Americans by requiring the FISA court, an Article III Court, to approve procedures to ensure that Americans are not targeted for warrantless surveillance.

To her credit, Harman warned against “a slippery legal slope to potential unprecedented abuse of innocent Americans’ privacy” and stated her opposition to granting telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. Perhaps her outrage at being a target of wiretapping herself will force her to realize that the program she deemed “essential” invaded the privacy of untold millions of Americans.

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a Washington Post op-ed today, Mark Thiessen claims that torture kept Americans safe, but his piece reveals far more about Thiessen’s ignorance about both torture and intelligence than about “enhanced interrogation” techniques.

Thiessen claims that “without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.” Thiessen is referring to the Library Tower attack that President Bush revealed in a February 2006 speech at the height of the outcry over the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Khalid Sheik Mohammed apparently told his CIA interrogators about this “plot” during one of his 183 waterboarding sessions.

This is exactly the kind of garbage you get from torture when the detainee will grasp for whatever he thinks his captors want to hear. One former National Security Council official put the “Library Tower story” in Al Qaeda’s “what if” category along side “what if Superman had worked for the Nazis.” In a report debunking the Library Tower claim a full year before Bush’s 2006 speech, the Los Angeles Times quoted a senior FBI official saying “to take that [Library Tower] and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous.”

Its not surprising that Thiessen would resurrect a supposed plot from a Bush speech because he probably wrote it. That’s right: Thiessen was a speechwriter, not an intelligence analyst, something that comes through loud and clear in his writing. He notes approvingly that torture “has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports,” which is like saying a baseball game resulted in 250 pitches. It’s an accurate figure, but a completely meaningless measurement. One CIA official who read all the reports on the KSM interrogations described them as, “total f***ing bulls***.”

For the sake of argument, lets just accept that LA was saved from another 9/11 because we tortured KSM. Even then, Thiessen’s claim that torture has kept Americans safe dissolves when one considers that our official policy of torture has resulted in hundreds of American soldiers and Marines being killed in Iraq.

Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym for the military interrogator in Iraq who uncovered — through a humane interrogation — the information that led to the airstrike that killed al Qaeda in Iraq’s leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said he “listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay.” He also wrote that “the large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq…. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.”

It’s depressing to watch former Bush administration officials defend “enhanced interrogation.” I wish Thiessen would have the guts to call it torture, but I guess that’s expecting too much from these guys. A former Pentagon analyst provided a perfect epilogue for this entire episode, “KSM produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

While I generally concur with Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin’s contention that journalist Roxani Saberi was “a target of convenience, arrested to make a diplomatic statement” by the Iranian regime against the United States, Rubin’s presentation of the history of the U.S.-Iran-Iraq relationship commits a serious sin of omission.

Rubin asserts that “throughout the 1980s, foreign-policy ‘realists’ in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, as well as a bipartisan array of congressmen and senators, sought to engage Saddam Hussein, calling the Iraqi president a moderate and a bulwark against Islamism.” Rubin means to warn against what he sees as similarly misconceived attempts to engage Iran, whose regime Rubin believes to be irretrievably hostile to the United States.

In reality, though it was not just “realists” who sought to engage with Saddam against Iran, but neoconservatives as well, including, notably, Michael Rubin’s employer Daniel Pipes, the founder and president of Middle East Forum and publisher of the Middle East Quarterly.

Writing in the New Republic in 1987 (“Back Iraq” pdf), Pipes and co-author Laurie Mylroie called for greater U.S. support for Iraq in almost precisely the terms that Rubin imputes to “realists” — as a bulwark against Iran. Though Pipes recognized that Saddam had “a history of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, support for terrorism and friendliness toward the Soviet Union,” Pipes claimed that “the Iranian revolution and seven years of bloody and inconclusive warfare have changed Iraq’s view of its Arab neighbors, the United States, and even Israel…Iraq is now the de facto protector of the regional status quo.”

It’s important to understand here that Pipes was arguing within the “authoritarian vs. revolutionary” framework established by neoconservative elder — and Iraq war skeptic — Jeanne Kirkpatrick in her seminal essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”

Like many others, Daniel Pipes turned out to be wrong about the stabilizing role that a mass-murdering dictator like Saddam Hussein could play in the Middle East. Pipes is somewhat unique, however, in that he was also eventually wrong about the salutary effects of removing Saddam. But Rubin has to ignore all of this in order to set up the “realists” as the villains of his story.