Keep America Safe: Monitor Terrorist Communications!

An excellent article in Opinion Journal providing a superb overview of the terrorist surveillance program and offering the legal expertise of Messrs. Rivkin and Casey who served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Here are the final two paragraphs:

...Moreover, the very fact that the intelligence community operates in a state of continued uncertainty about what precise surveillance parameters would be allowed in the future--instead of having the collection efforts driven entirely by the unfolding operational imperatives--is both unprecedented in wartime and highly detrimental. In past wars, as fighting continued, valuable battlefield experience was gathered, causing weapons systems, military organization and combat techniques to improve consistently. In this difficult war with al Qaeda, by contrast, the key battlefield intelligence-gathering program has been repeatedly emasculated.

Congress' obsession with the TSP's legal pedigree has become the major threat to its continued viability, rivaling in its deleterious impact the infamous "wall," much criticized by the 9/11 Commission, which prevented information sharing between the Justice Department's intelligence and law-enforcement divisions. It is hypocritical for those in Congress who preach fidelity to the 9/11 Commission recommendations to behave so dramatically at odds with their spirit. The question Judiciary Committee members should have been asking Mr. Gonzales was not whether he had misled them--he clearly did not--but whether the TSP is still functioning well. The question the public should be asking those senators--and with not much more civility than the senators showed Mr. Gonzales--is what are they going to do about it if the answer is no.