Sen. Harry Reid’s Stink Bomb

Sen. Reid’s stink bomb
washington times
Before leaving town, Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Sens. Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, left a lump of coal (and a stink bomb) in the stockings of the American people when it comes to prevention against terrorist attack.
After they failed on Monday failed to block Republican efforts to retroactively bar lawsuits against telephone companies that helped the government monitor suspected jihadist communications after September 11, Mr. Reid pulled from the floor legislation to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the primary law governing the monitoring of electronic communications.
Unless Congress acts, on Feb. 1 U.S. intelligence agencies will lose the ability to monitor at least some overseas terrorist telecommunications without first obtaining court approval.
Some special-interest groups would be very happy to see FISA expire. With the support of groups like People For the American Way, the ACLU and the blog DailyKos, Messrs.
Feingold and Dodd have been working feverishly to deny the telephone companies protection from lawsuits over their participation in terrorist surveillance efforts.
Mr. Dodd threatened to filibuster any effort to bar the lawsuits from going from going forward.
Mr. Reid had tried to broker a compromise between the decent FISA bill, negotiated by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia Democrat, and Sen. Kit Bond, Missouri Republican, which contains telecom immunity; and a Senate Judiciary Committee bill, pushed by Mr. Leahy (with an assist from Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and a who’s who of the political left) that would deny retroactive immunity.
Last month, the House passed a measure that fails to provide such immunity.
No case on the public record better illustrates the heightened dangers Americans will face than the case of three soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division who were ambushed May 12 south of Baghdad, apparently by al Qaeda.
One soldier was found dead on May 23, while the other two remain missing. As coalition forces searched for the missing soldiers on May 13 and May 14, intelligence officials learned about insurgent communications they believed to be related to the ambush. On May 14, a special court overseeing FISA issued an order permitting some suspected terrorist communications to be monitored.
The following day, lawyers and intelligence officials spent more than nine hours discussing the need for a FISA order to monitor these communications before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales authorized monitoring.
Critics attribute the delays in the search to bureaucratic “bungling” — an intellectually dishonest argument, because it overlooks the fact that the FISA court had issued several rulings earlier this year that called into question the government’s authority to act without prior court approval.
Mr. Reid this week was faced with a choice between fixing the problems and pandering to special-interest groups who want to make it impossible for the military to do its job. Once again, he made the wrong choice.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
Bush is supposed to be the Commander-in-Chief, currently running a war on terror. Surveillance of possible jihadists is a crucial facet of that war. Therefore, Bush should be able to conduct surveillance related to the war effort without needing any okay from Congress. I wish Bush would tell Reid to go play in the street, but I’m not holding my breath.
The Founders would be astonished at the modern Democrat Party.
“An ex post facto law (from the Latin for “from something done afterward”) or retrospective law, is a law that retrospectively changes the legal consequences of acts committed or the legal status of facts and relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law.”
Generally speaking, ex post facto laws are seen as a violation of the rule of law as it applies in a free and democratic society…

“The sentiment that ex post facto laws are against natural right is so strong in the United States, that few, if any, of the State constitutions have failed to proscribe them. The federal constitution indeed interdicts them in criminal cases only; but they are equally unjust in civil as in criminal cases, and the omission of a caution which would have been right, does not justify the doing what is wrong. Nor ought it to be presumed that the legislature meant to use a phrase in an unjustifiable sense, if by rules of construction it can be ever strained to what is just.” (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13th, 1813)