Political Blog

With the partisan furor over the National Security Agency dominating headlines, the debate over renewal of the Patriot Act has been pushed off the front pages. In this morning's New York Post, New York Congressman Vito Fossella offers a good summary of why extension of the act is so important. Among other things, he identifies two terrorist plots that have been uncovered using the act's tools:

Bin Laden's impotence is due not to a lack of trying, but rather to new and enhanced U.S. security measures. Since 9/11, U.S. officials and forces have disrupted 150 terrorist threats and cells, incapacitated 3,000 operatives worldwide and captured or killed nearly two-thirds of al Qaeda's senior leaders.

One key element has been the Patriot Act, which finally armed law enforcement and the intelligence community with the legal means to detect, disrupt and stop terrorists before they could strike.

The Patriot Act took laws already approved by the courts to fight organized crime and drug trafficking — such as roving wiretaps and delayed-notice search warrants — and applied them to terrorism. Gone are the days when law enforcement could conduct electronic surveillance to investigate mail fraud — yet couldn't do the same for terror-linked crimes like chemical-weapons offenses. Now the government can track and pursue Osama bin Laden as it does the Gotti family.

The 9/11 Commission skewered the federal government for its bans on information-sharing among the law-enforcement, intelligence and defense communities. The Patriot Act tears down this infamous wall so investigators can "connect the dots" to uncover and stop our enemies before they attack.

Indeed, that's precisely how nine terrorists affiliated with a violent Islamic extremist group with ties to al Qaeda were captured and jailed in the "Virginia Jihad" case in 2004. Law enforcement and prosecutors used information obtained through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to investigate members of the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center and dismantle their terrorist cell.

While al Qaeda embraced the digital age by using the Internet and satellite phones to conduct business, law enforcement was forced to wage its battle with laws from the rotary-phone era. The Patriot Act modernized the law to match today's technology. For instance, a provision to extend the trap-and-trace surveillance technique to online communications helped law enforcement identify several of the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

For what it's worth, I think the Patriot Act will be renewed, although no doubt watered down here and there. The Democrats want to make noise about the Act to cater to their far-left base, but they don't want to take responsibility for the consequences if the Act were allowed to expire, and successful terrorist attacks resulted.