War on Terror

9/11, War on Terror

14 held in plot to free terrorist in Belgium

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The War on Terror continues on the European front, as the Associated Press reports:

Belgian police detained 14 suspected Islamist extremists yesterday, and the government said they were plotting a jailbreak to free an al Qaeda prisoner convicted of planning to attack U.S. military personnel. Authorities tightened security, warning of a heightened threat of attacks despite the arrests. Police stepped up patrols at Brussels Airport, subway stations and the downtown Christmas market, which draws large crowds of holiday shoppers. “Other acts of violence are not to be excluded,” said Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. The U.S. Embassy warned Americans that “there is currently a heightened risk of terrorist attack in Brussels,” although it had no information about specific targets.

In a series of overnight raids across the country, police picked up 14 suspects and seized arms and explosives. The prime minister and prosecutor’s office said the detained suspects were planning to use the weapons to free Nizar Trabelsi, a 37-year-old Tunisian sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2003 for planning to a drive a car bomb into the cafeteria of a Belgian air base where about 100 U.S. military people are stationed.
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Trabelsi came to Europe in 1989 for a tryout with the German soccer team Fortuna Dusseldorf. He got a contract but was soon let go. Over the next few years, he bounced from team to team in the minor leagues, acquiring a cocaine habit and a lengthy criminal record. Eventually, he made his way to al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, where evidence presented at his trial showed he placed himself on a “list of martyrs” ready to commit suicide attacks. Trabelsi has admitted planning to kill U.S. soldiers. He said he met al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and asked to become a suicide bomber. He was arrested in Brussels two days after the September 11 attacks and police later linked him to the discovery of raw materials for a huge bomb in the back of a Brussels restaurant.

FISA, Terrorist Surveillance Program, War on Terror

New York Times “fine” with FISA law that delayed search for missing U.S. troops

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The New York Times is “fine” with the fact that after United States soldiers were kidnapped in Iraq, the existing FISA law delayed the monitoring of enemy communications while thousands of troops frantically searched for them.

The story about those kidnapped soldiers is here, this morning, in an editorial in the Washington Times:

Before leaving town, Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Sens. Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, left a lump of coal (and a stink bomb) in the stockings of the American people when it comes to prevention against terrorist attack. After they failed on Monday failed to block Republican efforts to retroactively bar lawsuits against telephone companies that helped the government monitor suspected jihadist communications after September 11, Mr. Reid pulled from the floor legislation to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the primary law governing the monitoring of electronic communications. Unless Congress acts, on Feb. 1 U.S. intelligence agencies will lose the ability to monitor at least some overseas terrorist telecommunications without first obtaining court approval.
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No case on the public record better illustrates the heightened dangers Americans will face than the case of three soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division who were ambushed May 12 south of Baghdad, apparently by al Qaeda. One soldier was found dead on May 23, while the other two remain missing. As coalition forces searched for the missing soldiers on May 13 and May 14, intelligence officials learned about insurgent communications they believed to be related to the ambush. On May 14, a special court overseeing FISA issued an order permitting some suspected terrorist communications to be monitored. The following day, lawyers and intelligence officials spent more than nine hours discussing the need for a FISA order to monitor these communications before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales authorized monitoring. Critics attribute the delays in the search to bureaucratic “bungling” — an intellectually dishonest argument, because it overlooks the fact that the FISA court had issued several rulings earlier this year that called into question the government’s authority to act without prior court approval.

Yet the New York Times is “fine” with letting the law expire that temporarily fixed this foolishness:

The issue before the Senate is fairly simple. Last summer, President Bush asked Congress to close a gap in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act created by advancements in technology…

That law expires in February, which means Congress has to pass new legislation giving the intelligence agencies a little more leeway in the wireless Internet age…
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…If the law expires, fine. It won’t harm national security, and it will give Congress time to reflect…

And, if the law expires and while Congress reflects, what happens if the enemy again kidnaps our troops? Will it again give them added time to get away and to torture and murder America’s troops? Will that be “fine” with Senators Leahy, Dodd, and Feingold?