By Ronald Kessler FBI agents and CIA officers will tell you that their single most important tool for hunting down terrorists and avoiding another 9/11 attack is the Patriot Act. Yet the Patriot Act will likely be the first law the Democrats will try to eviscerate if they gain control of Congress.
This year alone, the Democrats overwhelmingly voted five times to kill the Patriot Act. When that didn’t work, they filibustered.
Last December, after the vast majority of Senate Democrats voted against renewing the Patriot Act, their minority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., boasted to a cheering crowd of political supporters, “We killed the Patriot Act.” On the House side, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., along with a majority of House Democrats, voted on March 7 against re-authorizing the Patriot Act.
If Democrats take control of the House, Pelosi is said to be determined, as House speaker, to move up Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, R-Fla., to chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. According to Hastings, “The Patriot Act has given the government new powers to bug telephones, monitor e-mails and internet use, and search public databases. This is completely unacceptable.”
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry, running for the presidency, called the Patriot Act “an assault on our basic rights.”
Just what rights are they talking about? Before President Bush proposed the Patriot Act, because of what was known as “the wall,” FBI agents working the same case could not talk to each other about it because some were working it as a criminal case and others were working it as an intelligence case. “We had to report violations when criminal and intelligence agents talked to each other,”
Barry Mawn, who was assistant FBI director in charge of the New York field office, told me. “The assistant special agent in charge over both sides had to try to keep it all separate in his head. My guys were always coming to me and complaining that they weren’t allowed to share information between intelligence and the criminal side.”
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald recalled that when he worked on a criminal investigation of Osama bin Laden in New York in early 1996, “We could talk to citizens, local police officers, other U.S. government agencies, foreign police officers . . . We could even talk to al-Qaida members, and we did.” But, he said, “The FBI agents across the street from us were assigned to a parallel investigation of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. We could not learn information they had gathered.
That was ‘the wall.’” The wall also prohibited sharing of information between the FBI and the CIA. The 9/11 commission report tragically recounted how the distinction between criminal and intelligence matters precluded the FBI from taking the one step that might have led to unraveling the 9/11 plot before it took place.
On August 29, 2001, Ali Soufan, an FBI agent in the New York field office, pleaded with headquarters to approve a criminal investigation so that the full resources of his squad could be used to find Khalid al-Mihdhar, who turned out to be one of the 9/11 hijackers. When told that the wall prohibited taking that step, Soufan responded by email: “Someday someone will die — and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective . . .”
On September 11, al-Mihdhar boarded American Flight 77, which took off from Washington’s Dulles Airport en route to Los Angeles and crashed into the Pentagon at 9:40 a.m., killing 189 people. After the attacks, Soufan learned that al-Mihdhar was one of the hijackers. The agent informed his supervisor, who reassured him, “We did everything by the book.” The Patriot Act tore down the wall which tied the counterterrorism effort in knots.
It also gave the FBI the tools it needed to hunt down terrorists quickly before an attack occurs. Before the Patriot Act, the FBI had to obtain a separate authorization to wiretap each phone a suspected terrorist might use.
By the time the FBI obtained nearly a dozen signatures on a wiretap application and the approval of a judge, the suspect would switch devices again. At that rate, he could have committed any number of terror acts, potentially killing thousands of people.
Yet if the FBI were chasing drug traffickers, spies, or organized crime figures, it could obtain court authorization to wiretap a suspect regardless of what phone he was using.
Invariably, the media reported on the new powers contained in the Patriot Act without saying that the FBI already had such authority in pursuing lesser threats like drug dealers. Under the Patriot Act, each roving wiretap, as they are called, has to be approved by a judge, so there is no question about infringing on civil liberties any more than when a judge approves a search of the house of a suspected child molester. Yet Democrats have portrayed the act as a monstrous invasion of rights.
Democrats have also claimed that under another provision of the act, the FBI can use “sneak and peek” tactics in libraries to probe people’s reading habits without informing the targets until after a search. But the FBI always had authority, with a judge’s approval, to conduct a search without telling the suspect until a later point in the investigation. The Patriot Act speeded up the process. And the FBI has no interest in anyone’s reading habits. Its interest is in finding the bad guys before they kill again. In fact, some of the 9/11 hijackers used Internet connections at libraries to communicate with each other and evade detection.
Since the days when J. Edgar Hoover ordered illegal wiretaps and improper surveillance, the FBI as an organization has not engaged in illegal conduct. If the FBI cannot be trusted to wiretap within the framework of the law, why trust agents to make arrests or carry weapons?
Whose rights are being violated more — those whose phones are tapped by court order or those who died in the September 11th attacks? Commenting on the Democrats’ position regarding the Patriot Act, Bush said recently, “They must not think we’re at war. They must think that the best way to protect you is to respond after the attack.”
It is largely because of the efforts of the FBI and CIA, working with the tools provided by the Patriot Act, that we have not been attacked since 9/11. Despite those efforts, an attack inevitably will occur again some day. When it does, you can be sure that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Alcee Hastings will be first in line to castigate President Bush for not doing enough to protect America.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of NewsMax.com.
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