Ignoring the threat to focus on imagnined threats

Pete Hoekstra:

Domestic law enforcement requires a court-issued warrant to listen to calls between fellow Americans if they are suspected of plotting crimes. However, should we extend that same right to foreign enemies?

Thirty years ago we faced a large, lethargic bureaucracy in the Soviet Union that moved slowly. Today we face an enemy that is able to take advantage of a telecommunications system that moves at lightning fast speed.

Intercepting communications among foreign enemies simply no longer allows for any type of delay, especially when terrorist organizations and rogue regimes such as North Korea, Syria and Iran are actively exploiting the system against us. Such enemies do not provide us with the luxury of time to find and stop them.

The consequences of missing such communications materialized on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and America responded by creating a terrorist surveillance program so that we were not caught blind again.

The program fit well within the parameters of the U.S. legal system, but its illegal disclosure and demagoguery by partisans who exploited it for political gain caused the administration to place the program before a special U.S. court. In essence, it gave legal protections to foreign enemies who would do us harm.

We provided al-Qaeda terrorists with the same protections as U.S. citizens and are denying our intelligence professionals the ability to collect the dots that we have asked them to connect.

It is a loophole that desperately needs to be fixed. The inconvenient truth is that this is not a bumper-sticker war. The threat is real.

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Hoekstra is one of the sensible members of Congress. Unfortunately, since the 2006 election he is not longer in charge of the House intelligence committee, and the Democrats have other priorities than gathering enemy communications. They have this irrational concern that President Bush want s to listen to your phone calls. A rational person would recognize that he and the NSA have more important concerns, but we are talking a bout Democrats here.