ANTI-PATRIOT POLITICS
By LINDA CHAVEZ
NEW YORK Post Opinion
December 26, 2005
THE Democrats are determined to win the war and will stop at nothing to vanquish the enemy.
The only problem is that they're fighting the wrong war against an imaginary foe. Last week, a majority of Senate Democrats (and a handful of nervous Republicans) decided to abandon the War on Terror and instead wage war on what they mistakenly believe is a Bush administration assault on civil liberties.
First, they threatened to filibuster the renewal of certain provisions of the Patriot Act, despite having overwhelmingly supported these same provisions when the law was enacted in 2001. Then they jumped all over news reports that the president had ordered secret surveillance in the United States by the National Security Agency, without seeking a court order to do so.
Opponents of the Patriot Act can point to no single instance of serious abuse of civil liberties caused by the law in the four years since it was enacted. But that doesn't stop them from raising the specter of snooping feds pouring through library records or breaking into homes of innocent Americans for a "sneak and peek."
Worse, barely a year or two ago, many of these same critics were demanding congressional and independent commissions to investigate why this administration had failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
They can't have it both ways. Either we are fighting an all-out war on an unconventional enemy that has already proved its ability to exploit our legal system and operate within our own country, or we aren't.
I'm glad the NSA is using its sophisticated assets to monitor conversations between suspected terrorists in the United States and their handlers abroad.
FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley documented her fellow FBI agents' frustration when they were unable to get a search warrant in August 2001 to examine the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui — the man who would have been the 20th hijacker had he not been taken into custody a month before the attack. The whole plot might have fallen apart had the FBI been able to gain access to the information on Moussaoui's hard drive.
Democrats have lost all sense of proportion. It's hard to know if they are acting out of a misguided desire to protect civil liberties, which aren't truly being threatened in the first place, or simply playing politics. I'd like to think it's the former, but their actions over the last week point to partisanship as the likely cause.
Where were these Democrat putative civil libertarians when the Clinton administration claimed the authority to engage in warrantless searches in the mid-1990s?
As Byron York reported on National Review Online last week, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in July 1994 that "The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes, and that the president may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General."
It used to be that in a time of war, partisans put aside their differences and supported the commander in chief. Now it seems some Democrats would rather declare war on the president than ensure we win the real war being waged by our actual enemies.
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