At midnight tonight [Saturday] America will become much more susceptible to a terrorist act. It will happen because the Democrat-controlled Congress failed to reauthorize the Protect America Act. This legislation gives our military, intelligence, and law-enforcement communities the tools they need to conduct surveillance on terrorists. Yet, instead of fighting to make us safer Congress, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, blocked a vote on this bill all week and then went home on a twelve-day recess.

America is at war. I can attest to that after serving in Iraq as an Infantry Platoon Leader with the Army's First Calvary Division. My unit, an Infantry platoon, was responsible for capturing terrorists. I can tell you first-hand that we are fighting a very real enemy, radical Islamic terrorists, who want to do harm to America and her citizens. We are fighting the same terrorists that recently strapped bombs onto women with Down's Syndrome and forced them to walk into a crowded marketplace and explode the bombs, killing themselves and dozens of other innocent women and children.

My comrades in uniform, brothers and sisters and moms and dads, have given their lives in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism. This Congress, meanwhile, refuses to authorize our intelligence officials to collect important information that can disrupt terror attacks and refuses to give our law enforcement community the legal authority it never had before 9/11, but so desperately needed.

Today, because Congress failed to act, our intelligence officials no longer have the legal authority to collect foreign intelligence. Exactly the type of intelligence that disrupted several planned terrorists attacks on the United States. Because we face a very real threat to the national security of this country, we must take very real measures to protect our citizens and give our soldiers and our allies around the world the tools they need to keep us safe.

When will our Congress begin to display even a small amount of the courage that our men women fighting for us display day in and day out? Their refusal to reauthorize this legislation is more than an act of submission to trial lawyers, Moveon.org, and the far-left wing of a party that fails to recognize that we face deadly threats from radical Islamic terrorists. Its an act of political cowardice. It's a sign of an unwillingness to respect the sacrifices made by the members of the military who need that intelligence to successfully accomplish their mission.

02/15 06:19 PM

Dems Accuse Bush Administration of Politicized Fear-Mongering on FISA [Andy McCarthy]

It is worth observing that the Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, was the Director of President Clinton's National Security Agency from 1992-'96. He is not a partisan hack. He was a Vice Admiral in the Navy and is an old intelligence pro.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, McConnell explained that President Bush has been following his (McConnell's advice) on intelligence reform. As of midnight this morning, intelligence gathering powers are now back to where they were before the Protect America Act was passed in August 2007. At that time, according to McConnell, we had lost about two-thirds of our overseas collection capacity because of the FISA court ruling which, for the first time in history, required court authorization for monitoring foreigners outside the U.S. who contact other foreigners outside the U.S.

The Protect America Act reversed that ruling for six months. It is now expired. We cannot collect on new targets overseas without going to the FISA court and showing probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power. As foreigners outside the U.S. have no U.S. legal protection (or at least didn't until the FISA court ruling), and as the federal courts have no jurisdiction outside the U.S., we are not supposed to have to make any showing whatsoever to collect intelligence overseas.

When you go from no restrictions to no collection absent probable cause, that represents an enormous drop off in capacity. It's that simple. Democrats who claim that people like McConnell are engaged in partisan fear-mongering are talking nonsense. And as McConnell noted this morning, every day we don't fix this problem, the problem the investigative leads you don't get, the connections you don't make, the things you don't learn but which you should know metastasizes. Intelligence is dynamic: you can't stop collecting for a day, a week, a month or more and then figure you are picking up right where you left off. What you have lost tends to stay lost.