JIHAD'S COURTROOM WIN
NEW YORK POST
Editorial
August 18, 2006
The American people are suddenly less safe today - thanks to a presumptive and overtly political ruling by a left-wing Michigan federal jurist.
Yesterday, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor - who was appointed by (who else?) Jimmy Carter - declared unconstitutional the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance of some U.S.-based international phone calls by persons with suspected terrorist ties.
In ordering the narrowly tailored program halted immediately, Taylor used the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that could have been scripted by Michael Moore or George Soros.
"There are no hereditary kings in America," she declared in her 43-page opinion (apropos of what, it's not clear). "And no powers not created by the Constitution."
The administration, she added, suggested that the president has "the inherent power to violate not only the laws of Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution itself."
But the truly astounding part of the judge's ruling is that the victorious plaintiffs didn't even have to prove that any of their clients' conversations actually were intercepted.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit, merely claimed that its clients - a collection of journalists, scholars and lawyers - find it more difficult to do their jobs because they're afraid their overseas calls to some contacts might be monitored.
And that, they said, constitutes the proverbial "chilling effect" on free speech.
In that case, put us down in favor of a deep freeze.
The administration faced a genuine handicap in court - it couldn't defend itself, its lawyers said, because publicly disclosing details of the program would be impossible without destroying its effectiveness as an anti-terrorist weapon.
Too bad, said Judge Taylor.
The fact is, though, the program has been effective - and doubtless is a major reason why America has not yet suffered another major terrorist attack since the Twin Towers were destroyed.
As Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, said last December: "This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States."
Or as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the program earlier this year: "We have to collect the right dots before we can 'connect the dots.' " This program, he said, "provides the United States with the early-warning system we so desperately needed on Sept. 10."
As for the president's power to authorize warrantless surveillance, it was eloquently defended back in 1994 by Jamie Gorelick, then the Clinton administration's deputy attorney general and later one of the more blatantly anti-Bush members of the 9/11 Commission:
"Case law," she told Congress back then, "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."
We don't recall outraged Democrats yelping about the threat to civil liberties at that time.
Yet, they're doing so now - despite all the evidence, such as the just-foiled airline bombing plot out of London, that the threat remains real.
That's because this is all about partisan politics - and ideology.
Certainly Judge Taylor's ruling was utterly predictable.
A veteran hard-left political activist, she got her lifetime seat on the federal bench from Carter, for whom she'd eagerly campaigned. Taylor's first husband was Charles Diggs, a longtime Democratic congressman from Detroit who later went to prison in a payroll kickback scheme.
In 1998, she was accused of "unlawful" behavior and abusing "her legal and ethical duties" by a fellow federal judge: After recusing herself from hearing an affirmative-action case involving the University of Michigan, where her husband is a regent, she tried to pressure a Reagan appointee to turn the case over to a more sympathetic jurist.
Fortunately, Judge Taylor briefly stayed her ruling from taking effect while the 6th U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals - whose record shows a greater understanding of the need to protect American lives - hears the case.
But three other similar challenges to the program are making their way through the courts, including in New York.
With luck, the judges hearing those cases will appreciate that any threat to the civil liberties of Americans pales next to the danger posed by the jihadists intent on destroying them.
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