Transparency is Bipartisan

Not to get all conspiracy-minded today, but while researching NSA stuff, I ran across this Salon review of James Banford's Body of Secrets:

Among the more shocking things Bamford learned is that in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved something called Operation Northwoods. Fortunately never implemented, it involved committing random acts of terror on Americans in the United States and then blaming them on Cuba. Most of the documents detailing this Bamford found in the National Archives, among the thousands of papers the Joint Chiefs of Staff released about the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1967, the Israeli military attacked and destroyed the USS Liberty, a spy ship that had eavesdropped on an Israeli massacre of surrendered Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. The ship's intercepts were destroyed, but the NSA also had spy planes eavesdropping. The details, including President Johnson's coverup to save the Jewish vote in the next election, were in a box in the back of the NSA Museum. They were in a public place, but no one had bothered to look at them before.

Juicy stuff. And there's a larger point here: these were Democrats. Kennedy, particularly, remains an American icon. But even in his administration, there was contemplation and tentative implementation of wildly duplicitous, unethical schemes. Presidents cannot have carte blanche. That goes for Republicans and Democrats, for Bush and for Kerry. Oversight is how you safeguard the republic and ensure a leader's darker ideas don't manifest. No matter how certain administration apparatchiks are trying to spin this NSA stuff, it isn't a partisan issue and it shouldn't become one.