Helen Thomas should have retired before she decided to demonstrate why one shouldn’t try to do something well past their prime. In her liberal diatribe for a liberal west coast rag, Thomas makes glaring mistakes and incoherent stabs at misinformation:

Bush has used the 9-11 attacks as his carte blanche to initiate domestic spying on Americans without a court warrant in pursuit of terrorists, although the law is very clear that he needs court approval.

Actually, the law is very clear. When he is surveilling our enemies outside the country, he is well within the law to monitor all our enemies contacts – especially those contacts now in the US.

Poor Helen illustrates why the left is going to lose big on national defense – they are more worried about protecting the rights Al Qaeda sympathizers and agents in the US than finding them and stopping them. The acid test for these people is the very 9-11 terrorists themselves when they were planning and coordinating overseas and here.

Let’s use the example of Mohamed Atta, after his training by Al Qaeda, had contacted 9-11 pilots Hamdi and Midhar in the US (or vise versa). In poor Helen’s world it would be criminal to listen in on these discussions – even now!

Congress and the public in recent weeks have been stunned to learn that Bush has issued a secret order to the National Security Agency empowering it to listen in on the private conversations of Americans with suspected links to al-Qaida.

Helen is as ignorant as she is past her prime

There is no reason why the administration cannot seek permission from the FISA court, which is empowered to issue warrants retroactively within 72 hours of the surveillance. This negates the administration argument that it bypassed the court to avoid any delays in pursuing a suspect.

Obviously her investigative skills have died offf since we were able to find plenty of information on why it is clear that even today, another 9-11 plot would not be discovered if FISA was the only recourse, and liberals were back in charge.

One interesting aspect of this debate is the pounding the Clinton reputation is taking. Obviously the environment that led to 9-11 under Clinton was not a mistake, but a deeply held world view now that we see how the lefties respond to our efforts to stop the next 9-11. Given the response by the liberal media and lawmakers on the NSA program, it is clear 9-11 was very much a result of the Clinton era and how they viewed protecting America from lawbreakers (as oppose to protecting ourselves in a war).

We will be using the acid test example above of Atta communicating with Hamdi and Midhar from Germany, before he arrived in the US (once he arrived it became even more of a problem to monitor these people) to test the cluelessness of the left and their theories.