Sen. Patrick Leahy made a very strange comment at the end of a segment of Face The Nation yesterday – he basically claimed Bush knew the names of the highjackers before 9-11 and he wanted to get things right this time (paraphrasing). Michelle has the actual words and some commentary on this strange action by Leahy.

Of course, President Bush did not have any such information – the intelligence community did at some point. Leahy is probably babbling about either Able Danger, or when the CIA tried to recruit one of Atta’s associates in Germany, or Germany’s detection of the Hamburg cell and its members.

God help the Democrats if he is. We all know Atta and the other highjackers had been tripped over many times by US and Western intelligence agencies. They were detected in the 1999-2000 timeframe in Germany. Both the CIA and Germany tried to recruit some of them to infiltrate the cell in Hamburg.

We know key terrorists where detected in Southeast Asia, only to be lost when they arrived here in the US.

So Leahy and the Democrats are about to lay the largest political turd in history if they go this route. All this information was gathered under Clinton’s watch – and lost under Clinton’s watch. That’s right – we had them and lost them before the 2000 elections took place.

But even worse is the Midhar-Hazmi example of what was wrong with our national defence pre 9-11. As I posted yesterday, it is clear NSA leads (and therefore probably all military and intelligence leads) which identified possible terrorists in the US through the monitoring of terrorists’ calls overseas where thrown out – never to be passed to the FBI for follow-up.

Yesterday’s Washington Post article clearly indicates Bush’s order was to have leads NSA finds passed to the FBI for the first time, and used in the FISA Court for the first time in 2002 so warrants and surveillance of these people can be undertaken.

The first time! Midhar and Hazmi were absolutely safe talking to Atta in Hamburg under Clinton because of ‘The Wall’. Leahy is picking the one example of why FISA failed. It never allowed warrantless intelligence to be used as probable cause before 2002. And the Democrats seem ready to return to that idiotic state.