Bad News on the Home Front

Michael Hurd and Dick Morris have recently delivered blistering rebukes to members of Congress. Hurd also echoes my chagrin at the President for caving on McCain's anti-torture amendment. And he demolishes the sanctimonious charade behind the torture amendment in two sentences.

You are not lowering your standards by doing what you have to do to rid yourself of dangerous people with no standards in the first place. The only way to lower your standards is to give in to them.

Along similar lines, Dick Morris penned a damning column that should be required reading for anyone who can vote. (HT: TIA Daily) Here's a sample.

While the legislation President Bush proposed extends the entire act, certain key provisions are set to expire at year's end. (The rest of the act is good until September 2007.) By voting to allow these provisions to lapse, the Democrats have shown a total disregard for national security.

It is particularly galling that Sens. Clinton and Chuck Schumer whose New York constituents are in the terrorists' bull's-eye voted to let these vital protections expire.

How galling? One of the key provisions due to expire in two weeks is one that President Bill Clinton presented as the cornerstone of his response to the escalation of terrorism in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

And another.

As a further Christmas anti-present to New Yorkers, Clinton, Schumer & Co. are also killing the Patriot Act provision that demolishes the infamous wall erected by Clinton-era Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick between those who investigate terrorism and those who prosecute suspects.

The goal was to avoid tainting criminal prosecutions, by avoiding the collection of evidence without a full search warrant. But the result was to keep the left hand from knowing what the right hand was doing when it came to preventing acts of terrorism.

Like the 9/11 attacks.

And another.

In 2002, the feds (presumably the NSA) picked up random cellphone chatter using the words "Brooklyn Bridge" (which apparently didn't translate well into Arabic). They notified the New York Police Department, which flooded the bridge with cops. Then the feds overheard a phone call in which a man said things were "too hot" on the bridge to pull off an operation. Later, an interrogation of a terrorist allowed by the Patriot Act led cops to the doorstep of this would-be bridge bomber. (His plans would definitely have brought down the bridge, NYPD sources told me.)

Why didn't Bush get a warrant? On who? For what? The NSA wasn't looking for a man who might blow up the bridge. It had no idea what it was looking for. It just intercepted random phone calls from people in the United States to those outside and so heard the allusions to the bridge that tipped them off.

Incredible!

--CAV