The Dems and their killer intel restrictions

Vito Fossella:

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I treasure our civil liberties, but I also value the lives of the American people - and the terrorists' war against us sometimes requires gathering intelligence quickly to stop a new attack from occurring.

For instance, when seven US solders were kidnapped by al Qaeda gunmen in Iraq in May 2007, the intelligence community was ready to spring into action to begin surveillance in hopes of finding them . . . until lawyers in Washington stopped them cold.

They were hamstrung by the outdated FISA law, which prevented them from conducting surveillance without first obtaining a warrant. As the kidnappers planned, plotted and acted, lawyers sat around a conference room table for nearly 10 hours drafting legal briefs to show probable cause to conduct the surveillance.

Those seven soldiers never returned home. One of them was Spec. Alex Jimenez of Queens, whose mother, Maria Duran, said it best: "If they would have acted sooner, maybe they would have found something out and been able to find my son. . . . They should change the law, because God only knows what type of information they could have found during that time period."

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Congress has eight days to act, but Democrats like Chris Dodd would rather see Americans killed than have effective terrorist surveillance. The old FISA restrictions are an abomination that should never have been put into law. Allowing them to come back would be a travesty as well as a gift to the terrorist.