It's A Brand Old World

Namely, the world of September 10th, 2001:

The Senate on Friday blocked a vote to reauthorize 16 expiring provisions of the controversial USA Patriot Act.

As Congress raced toward adjournment, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a threatened filibuster by Senators Russ
Feingold, D-WI, and Larry Craig, R-ID, and other lawmakers who opposed the provisions. The final vote was 52-47.

Words fail me. And that doesn't happen very often.

It is interesting timing for the latest intelligence bureaucracy leak to the New York Times, though (Brother Hinderaker concurs):

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Any sane person would read this and say, "Good, I hoped they were doing something like that." This is why sanity and common sense are generally found in each other's vicinity - as well as that of the Bush White House:

The Bush Administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the Administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

It goes without saying that the White House asked the NYT not to publish the story, on national security grounds. So of course the Times breaks it on the day of the vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act. And now Capitol Hill is in an uproar - not over yet another leak of critical national security information that, as Hugh Hewitt writes this morning, "has clearly alerted terrorists to the news that the US has dropped one of the standard operating procedures that al Qaeda may have believed continued to protect them," and which, as Rocketman argues today, should result in a full-scale "Plamegate"-style criminal investigation of the leak and leaker - but the NSA anti-terror policy.

Add to all of the above the President caving on the "confusing, vague, lazy, perilous" McCain "anti-torture" amendment, and, hell, who needs to cut & run from Iraq when our rulers are in full scale retreat from al Qaeda at home?

The biggest cliche about 9/11 was that after the Pentagon was smashed and the WTC towers fell, "Everything changed."

History will record December 16th, 2005, as the day that "everything" changed back.

I wonder how many thousands of American civilians will have to die the next time for sanity to make a comeback - and if the handful of senators who re-exposed them to jihadi slaughter will even be held accountable.

[HT: Sister Toldjah]

UPDATE: NRO rightfully blasts the four Republican collaborators (Sununu, Craig, Murkowski, Hagel - contact information is here) who are providing political cover to Senate Democrats on this stupefying Patriot Act filibuster. Given that the vote for cloture (52-47) would have failed without their help, would somebody please explain to me why in the blue hell they are lending it?

This is, indeed, another "day of infamy." Only this time the infamy is self-inflicted.

UPDATE II: Jonah Goldberg nails the futilty of the pandering aspect of the McCain amendment:

We've all heard about the chilling effect this may have on reasonable interrogation techniques and the unfair price some Americans might have to pay for using them after this ban goes into effect.

But this has been explained away as a small price to pay for improving our image abroad. But who says it will? We know that al Qaeda instructs its operatives to claim they were tortured even when they weren't. They certainly won't stop making those claims now. Indeed, their incentive to "prove" American deceit and hypocrisy is much greater.... Moreover, I sincerely doubt that the "international community," human rights groups and the foreign and domestic press won't be eager to credit such claims at the first opportunity. Recall how merely transporting al Qaeda to Gitmo in hoods prompted the British tabloids to scream "Torture!" (which immediately put the allegation into the American media bloodstream)? Well, why do we think they won't do that again over some minor or fabricated infraction of these new, incredibly strict, rules?...

In short, not only do I think we're not buying much good PR but we are setting ourselves up for a huge PR disaster down the road.

This gets back to the core problem with this whole "torture" issue - we haven't been "torturing" anybody. The one and only reason that there is a McCain amendment at all is that the Democrats and their press allies have spent the entire year (or, rather, year and a half, dating back to Abu Ghraib, which is the Three Mile Island of "scandals" in that it was proof not of American "torture" but that the military in fact did a perfectly acceptable job of self-policing - before the original incident got, natch, leaked to the media) shrieking accusations of "torture" at the Bush Administration, completely and utterly without any substantiation, and quite a bit of substantiation to the contrary. And the usual process ensued: congressional Republicans got scared, "Sailor" recognized it as a "maverick" grandstanding opportunity, and the Bushies just wanted it all to go away.

As J-Gold sagely predicts, "it" will never go away because slandering the U.S. will never go away. And slandering the U.S. will never go away if our rulers can do no better than pandering to our slanderers. Which, in this case, includes the bulk of the Democrat party.

It'd sure be nice to see the White House add a well-placed veto of this debacle-in-the-making to its "push-back" effort. As it stands now, a lone Republican congressman is the last line of defense.

UPDATE 12/17: Well, for once Bush isn't letting moss grow under his feet. I just hope and pray it isn't too little, too late. Our very lives may depend upon it.