The Sept. 11 hijackers made dozens of telephone calls to Saudi Arabia and Syria in the months before the attacks, according to a classified report from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel," the Chicago Tribune reports:
According to the report, 206 international telephone calls were known to have been made by the leaders of the hijacking plot after they arrived in the United States--including 29 to Germany, 32 to Saudi Arabia and 66 to Syria.
These are calls between al Qaeda terrorists and their associates, in which one side of the call is in the U.S. and the other is in another country--that is, just the kind of call the National Security Agency listened to under the terrorist surveillance program. Had such a program existed in 2001, it might have prevented 9/11--but if some journalists and Democrats are scandalized now, imagine how they would have howled in outrage if 9/11 hadn't happened.
4 comments:
Six: Those are "domestic" calls! Seriously, I see a multiple choice question here:
Should the executive branch have the capacity to bug such calls without first obtaining a judicial warrent:
(A) Absolutely (Bush's answer);
(B) With oversight from Congressional monitors, with the judiciary deciding disagreements between the two (my answer, and that of some republican critics);
(C) Absulutely not (Tom & Nadir's answer?)
I don't like this at all. This means the NSA would possibly be interested in my international calls to Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, the UK and Canada. None of the people I am calling are terrorists, but the NSA doesn't care about that.
I disagree with your assessment, Paul. Why is it necessary to bypass the FISA warrant guidelines? It is stupid to do so. If a judge sees just cause for a warrant, then a bug may be appropriate. Law enforcement, on the other hand, should NOT have the right to wiretap American citizens without due process.
Period.
In wartime, Nadir, as long as there is oversight from the other branches, I support this. *You* know that your international calls don't involve terrorits, and *you* say that the NSA doesn't care; I say that the NSA doesn't know, but *does* care... or rather, I assume and hope so. Lack of oversight bothers me, as this permits one group of people to decide if parties in your international calls are terrorists, whereas oversight means that their records may get scrutiny.
Warrents prevent fast action; warrentless oversight permits fast action while also providing assurance that outside auditors can spot misuse, and stop it via the courts. This does of course involve trust that the parties implimenting and overseeing the policy are ethical and on-task. I am certain that the neo-Robert E. Lees are on-task, and I fear them more than I do Americans in suits trying to identify and kill them.
As you know, I object to all the billions of dollars and millions of hours invested by us all with regard to the new taliban airport security measures. I consider all that a waste; worse than doing nothing. But this, I don't see any imposition to people's communication.
I don't like the government listening to my phone calls no matter who I am talking to or what I am talking about.
The insistance here, also that the hijackings would have been prevented if these Orwellian tactics had been in place prior to 9/11 is a joke. Had the FBI followed up on its leads in that case, they could have obtained FISA warrants. Additionally, if Clinton had authorized these wiretaps without a warrant, you guys would have called for his head... and rightly so!
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