Sunday, January 08, 2006

 

Steyn on Those Who Would Grant 4th Amendment Rights to our Foreign Enemies

Mark Steyn just gets better and better. Now he's making sense about what is necessary to fight against the militant Islamicists who declared war against us and attacked us here with terrorist tactics on 9/11/03. Money quotes:

It's very hard to fight a terrorist war without intelligence. By definition, you can only win battles against terrorists pre-emptively -- that's to say, you find out what they're planning to do next Thursday and you stop it cold on Wednesday. Capturing them on Friday while you're still pulling your dead from the rubble is poor consolation... If the state cannot take action until its sworn enemy uses those materials, it had better be prepared to lose the war.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out the obvious. But, unmoored from reality, wafting happily into fantasy land safe in the hermetically sealed Democrat-media bubble, Sen. Barbara Boxer and her colleagues are apparently considering impeaching the president for eavesdropping on al Qaida calls made to U.S. phone numbers. Surely, even Karl Rove can't get that lucky
.

[...]

This isn't a hypothetical situation. Consider Iyman Faris, a naturalized American citizen also known as Mohammad Rauf and nailed by U.S. intelligence through the interception of foreign-U.S. communications. He was convicted in 2003 for doing the legwork on an al Qaida scheme to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge... In 2002, he was commissioned by al Qaida to return to America and procure the materials for severing suspension-bridge cables and derailing trains.

Do you want Iyman Faris in jail? Or do you think he should have the run of the planet until he's actually destroyed the bridge and killed hundreds of people? Say, the Golden Gate Bridge just as you're driving across after voting for Barbara Boxer and congratulating yourself on your moral superiority.

But, if you want Iyman Faris in jail, you better consider how you're going to get him there -- because, as a rule, the only way you find out details of a terrorist plot is by intercepting communications. And these days that means electronic communications, like telephones...


Read the whole thing.

Comments:
I know, it is a rare day that I don't delight in a Steyn column.
 
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