NOT AN ARGUMENT THE LEFT CAN WIN (via Gene Brown):

1978 surveillance act hinders 2006 security (Jonathan Gurwitz, 02/19/2006, San Antonio Express-News)

Where is the safest place in the world for Osama bin Laden to hide while continuing to direct the terrorist plots of al-Qaida? The United States.

If you think that's an exaggeration, consider what Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, told the House Intelligence Committee in April 2000.

To illustrate the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — passed by Congress in 1978 — Hayden cited a Saudi terror leader whose name was then not widely known: "If ... Osama bin Laden is walking across the peace bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, New York, as he gets to the New York side, he is an American person and my agency must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure."

Hayden's testimony about FISA six years ago proved to be lethally prescient. When FBI agents in Minneapolis arrested a French-born man of Moroccan descent named Zacarias Moussaoui during the summer of 2001, the Justice Department declined to issue a FISA warrant to search his computer files.

Moussaoui had come to the attention of U.S. law enforcement due to a tip from French intelligence about his connection to Islamic terrorists, and for the curious fact that he expressed an interest to a Minnesota flight school in learning only how to fly a commercial airliner, not how to take off or land.

In 1999, the NSA began monitoring a cell phone number in Yemen that served as a switchboard for al-Qaida. Among the callers who connected to this switchboard was a "Khalid" in the United States. The NSA dropped surveillance of the caller for fear of violating FISA provisions on domestic spying. Khalid turned out to be Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the 9-11 hijackers who took over American Airlines Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon.