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From Ronald Kessler:
WASHINGTON -- 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.
Read the whole thing.
