What The Past Teaches About Eavesdropping
From: Gary Bauer
If President Bush's much-maligned program to intercept communication from Al Qaeda suspects abroad to people in the U.S. had been in place before September 11th, the attacks may have been thwarted. That is what Debra Burlingame suggests in a Wall Street Journal column this morning. For those who may not recognize her name, Debra Burlingame is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on that horrible morning. I believe Debra Burlingame is right.
Two of the hijackers of flight 77 were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi. The two hijackers lived in San Diego and received more than a dozen phone calls from an Al Qaeda "switchboard" in Yemen. The National Security Agency (NSA) had the numbers being called in the U.S. but didn't intercept the calls because of fear the agency would be accused of domestic spying. "The rest is history."
By the way, in case you are wondering who Debra Burlingame's source is - it is none other than NBC. It aired a story in 2004 by senior correspondent Lisa Myers, who called the failure to intercept the calls one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives." Today, NBC and all the networks call the same phone intercepts "domestic spying." So, according to "big media" the Bush Administration failed when it didn't intercept phone calls into the U.S. from known terrorists, and it is violating the Constitution now when it does intercept such calls.
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