Shameful acts

According to CNN, Bush is attacking people who want judicial oversight over citizen surveillance by saying:

My personal opinion is it was a shameful act, for someone to disclose this very important program in time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.

It is in no way shameful. The New York Times sat on the story for an entire year waiting for the President to either come clean or get judicial oversight back into the process, but he just kept doing it.

The shameful act was instituting covert citizen surveillance when it has explicitly been outlawed by Congress. The shameful act was not respecting the basic principle of judicial oversight over the ability of law enforcement to pry into our lives. The shameful act was to try to smear people looking to stop some of our most fundamental freedoms from being bartered away in the name of a neverending war on terror.

Think about it. Ten years ago, what country would you think someone would be describing if they told you their leader instituted illegal secret surveillance of its citizens, held people offshore indefinitely in a network of secret prisons without access to counsel, and violated the Geneva Convention by using torture to extract information from prisoners? Would you even remotely have thought about America? These are the sorts of things that enemies of freedom, not defenders of freedom, engage in. The war on terror is no justification for waging a secret war on our civil liberties. Like Benjamin Franklin said:

They who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.