LITTLE ROCK — DID YOU read that story on Friday's front page about the latest bomb plot against American targets? It was hard to miss the headline: "Immigrant is indicted in U.S. terrorism plot/ Bomb attacks planned, prosecutors say."
One item in particular leapt out at some of us: "Using information gleaned from phone and e-mail intersects, surveillance footage and receipts from vendors, prosecutors drew a picture of Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan man at the center of the scheme . . ."
Phone and e-mail intersects?
Wait a minute. Aren't those the kind of counter-terrorism measures that have been denounced for years, but especially during last year's presidential campaign, as awful, illegal, unconstitutional and just plain atrocious invasions of Americans' basic rights by that terrible war criminal George W. Bush and his whole administration? Wasn't the judicious combination of data-mining, tracing and wiretapping of international phone traffic routinely referred to as Warrantless Wiretapping in the press? See almost any story about the subject in the New York Times, which may even have collected a Pulitzer Prize or two on the basis of its over-the-top coverage of this issue. As if monitoring international phone calls hadn't passed constitutional muster for years, proving its worth.
Strangely enough, even though the country now has a new president and commander-in-chief, one who campaigned loudly against the way his predecessor in the Oval Office chose to protect the national security, Barack Obama hasn't acted to end those Warrantless Wiretaps or any of the other surveillance techniques mentioned in this news story. Nor has this president yet moved to repeal the Patriot Act, which also got a bad rap from the usual sources. Or even change it at all.
Conclusion: Being president, instead of just campaigning for the office, and actually having to protect the country, may give a man a whole new perspective on some matters. Thank God.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 09/28/2009