FOLLOWING 9/11, all Ameri cans vowed to never allow ourselves to be so vulnerable again. But now the Democratic Congress is allowing a key law to lapse – removing a key tool in our defenses.
The Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act allows US officials to listen in on conversations of suspected terrorists overseas. It has helped block several attacks, including plans to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
Yet the program is set to expire in about a week, thanks to a sunset provision included by the Democrats when Congress modernized the law last year. And there’s no real sign that they’re going to make the law permanent before that deadline.
At best, they’ll pass a short extension – kicking the can down the road for a month or two.
The Democratic leadership only allowed a vote to modernize the law last year on the day before Congress was scheduled to recess for summer . . . and then only after the director of national intelligence warned that we are “missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country.”
Under enormous public pressure, Democratic leaders brought a bill to the floor – then urged their members to vote nay. Some 82 percent of House Democrats listened, voting against giving intelligence officials the tools they need to monitor communications between suspected terrorists in foreign countries. Meanwhile, 99 percent of Republicans voted for it.
The leadership included the sunset provision to appease Democrats who opposed the bill anyway. And they never followed through on their pledge to begin work immediately on making the law permanent.
The law returned speed and agility to the surveillance of terrorists overseas by eliminating the need to first obtain a warrant. But it also has federal judges review the procedures that are used to collect this information.
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They were hamstrung by the outdated FISA law, which prevented them from conducting surveillance without first obtaining a warrant.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.”
If Congress fails to act over the next eight days, it would reopen a legal loophole big enough to drive a truck with explosives through it – and don’t think al Qaeda won’t take advantage of it.
No good can come from restricting intelligence officials from monitoring the communications of terrorists overseas. And it’s counterproductive to give law enforcement the tools to win the War on Terrorism while threatening to take them away at any moment.
If left unchecked, al Qaeda will strike again – perhaps with a nuclear or chemical bomb on a crowded street. Maintaining our surveillance of terrorists depends on Congress’ commitment to protect America. We have a responsibility to do everything possible to prevent more children from losing a parent . . . and more parents from losing a child.
Now is not the time to turn back the clock to Sept. 10, 2001.
Rep. Vito Fossella, a Republican, represents Staten Island and Brooklyn.