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Selling us out on national security
The bill also omits any retrospective liability provision that would prevent lawsuits against telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon, which assisted the government in monitoring suspected terrorist telephone calls following the September 11 attacks. These companies deserve thanks, not harassment in the courts. By failing to include this provision, the Democrats have reneged on a promise they made to National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell to address the issue. In the past week, Mr. Reyes and his colleagues have become deeply worried about a political problem with their bill: that it would require a court order to monitor communications of the very terrorists that American GIs are fighting on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The case of the three soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division based in Ft. Drum, N.Y., who were ambushed by al Qaeda operatives in May, has become a clear and present danger to the RESTORE Act. Briefly, here are the facts (reported on this editorial page weeks ago and more recently picked up by other news organizations): Three U.S. soldiers were kidnapped May 12 south of Baghdad in an al Qaeda attack that killed four of their colleagues. As U.S. soldiers searched for the men May 13 and May 14, intelligence officials learned about jihadist communications that were possibly related to the ambush. On May 15, more than nine hours elapsed while U.S. intelligence officials discussed the need to obtain a FISA court order to monitor these communications and obtained authorization to do so. Mr. Reyes and the left-wing blogosphere are hyping a memo released Monday by the Democrat staff of the Intelligence Committee which purports to show that the delays were caused by bureaucratic bungling, not FISA. Their argument is disingenuous and misleading in the extreme. Until this year, it was legal under FISA to monitor terrorists in Iraq by placing a wiretap in the United States. But in a series of rulings between January and May, the special court overseeing FISA called this into question. On May 15, U.S. intelligence officials — fully aware that the legal ground justifying the ability to conduct warrantless searches was shifting beneath their feet — did what they had to do to prevent the likes of Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers from hauling them before their committees for allegedly "violating the rule of law": They jumped through all manner of bureaucratic hoops before eavesdropping on the terrorists who kidnapped the three American troops (one of whom was found dead, while the other two remain missing.) The RESTORE Act would effectively enshrine this kind of idiocy that endangers our troops as the law of the land. For the Democratic leadership, pandering to the left-wing blogosphere and the ACLU is apparently a higher priority than the safety of American GIs fighting al Qaeda.
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One Big Ass Mistake, America "Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end." |
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