Perhaps if Bush had mention that Congress had failed last December to renew the Patriot Act, he would have given the Democrats another reason to stand and applaud...
From Investors Business Daily:
National Security: With the Feb. 3 deadline for renewing the Patriot Act looming, kicking the can down the road again is not an option. Had it been in place on Sept. 10, 2001, Sept. 11 might not have happened.
If your house were on fire, and firemen had to kick your door down and break a few windows to save you and your family, would you consider that an invasion of your privacy or a violation of your civil liberties?
Yet that is precisely the attitude Senate Democrats take regarding the Patriot Act despite evidence that it has infringed on no one's rights, except perhaps on the freedom of terrorists to plot mass murder undetected and unmolested.
Democrats say the Patriot Act, approved 99-1 four years ago, was enacted in a fit of rage and panic and needs fixing lest its powers be abused. But as Rep. Vito Fosella, R-N.Y., notes, Congress has scrutinized the act in 115 hearings, and there have been more than 100 pages of responses to specific questions by members of the House.
As we have reported, the Justice Department in January 2004 conducted a six-month review of the law in which 1,266 complaints filed after its passage were examined. The conclusion was that not a single American's rights had been violated. No American disappeared after a midnight knock on the door. No library was stormed by a SWAT team.
There are, however, terrorists who've had their lives and plans disrupted. As reported in the Los Angeles Times last July, since 9-11 five large terrorist cells have been broken up, from Lake Erie to Puget Sound. The Justice Department reports that under the Patriot Act, charges have been filed against 401 people, with 212 being convicted or pleading guilty.
Could the act have prevented 9-11? Section 218 eliminated the "wall" that had been erected between intelligence agencies and criminal investigations. In August 2001, FBI headquarters barred a New York intelligence agent looking for future hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar from consulting colleagues in the bureau's criminal division.
Responding to an email from FBI brass, the agent was prophetic: "Someday someone will die and — wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective" against terrorists. Apparently some Democrats still don't understand.
Take the oft-cited "library provision," officially Section 215, which in fact does not use the word "library" at all. Under this provision, FBI agents might have visited New Jersey's William Patterson University and discovered that al-Hamzi and al-Mihdhar had used that state institution's computers to purchase tickets for American Airlines Flight 77, which they plowed into the Pentagon.
According to Debra Burlingame, whose brother piloted Flight 77 and was one of the first to die that day: "The Patriot Act would have saved 3,000 lives, and what's scary about this is once they start tinkering with it, it could cost not just 3,000, but tens of thousands of lives." It could cost us an entire city next time.
When Sen. Harry Reid successfully led a Dec. 16 filibuster blocking reauthorization, he reportedly bragged: "We killed the Patriot Act." If he and his colleagues prevail in blocking its renewal, or succeed in gutting its effective provisions, that may be the epitaph on the tombstones of Americans killed in the next attack.
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