Democrat dereliction of duty on intel bill

Adam Putnam:

DEMOCRATS in charge of Congress have a clear choice before them when they reconvene the House today: Will they act immediately to close significant gaps in America's intelligence capability - or not?

Ten days ago, their leaders chose to adjourn the House of Representatives without passing a Senate-approved anti-terror bill that had overwhelming bipartisan support. As a result, Democrats left America at significant risk and potentially blind to new terrorist plots.

The Democrats' dereliction of duty left our intelligence community without critical, 21st-century intelligence tools for unearthing those plots. Until the House passes this bill, our agencies are bound by the overly bureaucratic Vietnam-era law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

FISA was in effect on 9/11, too. A bipartisan congressional inquiry into why our nation was blindsided by those attacks later concluded that "difficulties with the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected al Qaeda operatives in the United States."

One of the main contributors to that report was none other than Nancy Pelosi - now the speaker of the House.

Yet since then, intelligence professionals and leaders in both parties have asked Speaker Pelosi to cooperate in modernizing the FISA law and putting our intelligence collection methods on a surer footing - and she has instead opted for stalling tactics and partisan rhetoric.

...

The concern of Democrats for terrorist privacy makes no sense, unless you consider the contributions from trial lawyers to their campaigns. The trial lawyer's concern for terrorist privacy rights also makes no sense unless you consider the pay day they expect from suing companies who were patriotic in cooperating with the government's attempt to stop the next attacks. They have tried to justify these cases with by appealing to the paranoid who think the government is interested in their conversations. If they are not communicating with the enemy they should have no concerns and if they are they should have no expectations of privacy.