Investor's Business Daily, September 7th, 2007
War On Terror: U.S. interceptions of suspicious communications between Pakistan and Germany prevented car bombings that could have killed hundreds of Americans. Yet some are still worried about terrorists' privacy.\
Yet another dazzling victory for law enforcement and intelligence officers over Islamists, thanks to aggressive surveillance tools: The Los Angeles Times reported that last week's arrest by German police of three suspected Muslim terrorist plotters based in Stuttgart and Saarland, near the French border, was due to U.S. intelligence detecting e-mails between publicly accessible computers in Germany and contacts in Pakistan last year.
The leader of the militants, who were associated with al-Qaida breakaway organization Islamic Jihad Union, received explosives training at a Pakistan camp last year. Their plan was to car-bomb crowded bars, restaurants serving U.S. bases and German airports with what amounted to over 1,000 pounds of TNT.
"It's not just the military, but Americans in general," a law enforcement official commented of their intended targets. "If they could have wiped out 1,000 American tourists, they would have been happy."
This important victory in the global war on terror illustrates that preventing terrorist attacks within the American homeland is a massive operation that cannot succeed without the use of broad, swift surveillance powers.
Consider these facts:
As simple and straightforward as this plot seems, foiling it took more than 300 investigators monitoring the suspects night and day for nine months. Allowing judges to micromanage such operations could have shut off the surveillance at crucial times.
The communications that led officials to thwart the plot were between the target Western nation and a terrorist-infested Islamic country. It is chilling to contemplate that the communications liberal Democrats in Congress, liberal federal judges and legal terrorist facilitators such as the American Civil Liberties Union want to impede are those between U.S.-based contacts and suspected terrorists abroad.
New York District Judge Victor Marrero, recommended by the Senate's chief Democratic Party fundraiser, Sen. Charles Schumer, and appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton in 1999, last Thursday gave the ACLU a victory, striking down portions of the Patriot Act. The Puerto Rican-born Marrero was a diplomat in the Carter and Clinton administrations, as well as an operative in the administrations of four New York City Democratic mayors.
Marrero's ruling requires court approval when the FBI orders Internet providers and phone companies to provide records without notifying suspects, so the targets remain unaware of their being investigated. In 2004, Marrero issued a similar ruling against a previous version of the Patriot Act. Enforcement of this ruling will be delayed 90 days pending appeal.
In the six years since 9/11, the FBI has issued well over 100,000 national security letters to obtain records to track terrorist communications and activities, which do not require the approval of a court. Marrero's ruling, if not overturned by a higher court, is expected to cripple the FBI in its ability to use national security letters as a means of breaking up terrorist plots.
Marrero complained in his ruling of "the risk of investing the FBI with unchecked discretion ... " and charged that the Patriot Act contains "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values."
ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero could be found gloating about "yet another setback in the Bush administration's strategy in the war on terror."
Scoring political points against President Bush obviously thrills the ACLU; when its mischief, God forbid, produces a new 9/11 we hope it makes an extensive examination of conscience.
The real risks to Americans, as opposed to Marrero and Romero's imaginary ones, come from Islamist terrorists, as the uncovering of the German plot last week once again proved. And it is a lot more than "breaking and entering" those mass murderers have in mind.
In protecting ourselves, we must not be impeded by foot-dragging judges, many of whom obviously think the FBI is a greater danger to the American people than al-Qaida and other Islamofascist terrorist groups.
