It's not the Europeans who know terrorists best, it's the Israelis.

A year ago, at Ben Gurion, we were subjected to the screening procedure boarding a British Air flight to London. A cute young Israeli woman asked us about ten minutes worth of questions. The woman was disarming and the questions were disarming ("Where were you Bar Mitzvahed?").

Then we went through the metal detector. With our shoes on. And our laptops inside their bags. And any amount of liquids we wanted to take aboard.

Why? Because we had been screened as individuals, not as objects. Having been determined to be of zero security risk, our bottled water was deemed safe.

As a lawyer, Diaz had a terrible moral dilemma. Like it or not, his client was the government, and although going through all channels to express his concerns might have been, in his judgment, futile, that was his duty. An analogy could be made to the rules under Sarbanes-Oxley for what lawyers are supposed to do when they become aware of wrongdoing by corporations that are traded publicly.

As a citizen, though, Diaz did the right thing. His duty to uphold the Constitution was paramount. That he should suffer for it is an indication that George Orwell was an optimist who did not imagine George W. Bush.

In "The Shame of the Cities", Lincoln Steffens describes mayors who ran on reform tickets only to steal more efficiently than their corrupt predecessors. George W. Bush ran on the ticket of restoring honor to the White House, which was a code for saying "I won't get a blow job." Instead, he has placed the credibility of the United States at its lowest ebb ever.

What's behind the focus on FISA as being inadequate to protect us?

Three possibilities:

1. It is a cover-up of the Bush Administration's incredible incompetence between January and September 2001. When you believe that you were anointed by God (as opposed to, say, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy), you believe that God gave you the time and peace to put things into effect in your own order and at your own pace. The idea that "Bin-Laden determined to attack in US" meant that you should change your way of doing things to dismantle everything Clinton had put in place was--shudder!--un-American, and an American God would never allow it to happen. So stick with the program. Nothing bad is going to happen.

When you compare Bush's reaction to the piece of intelligence to Clinton's reaction to the possibility of millennium attacks, you really understand whose competent here.

2. They've been using the data mined from the telecoms for political and personal use, and only telecom immunity will cover up their malfeasance. Indeed, telecom immunity is the price they are willing to pay to make sure it never reaches the light of day. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it is more than a little ironic that the "bipartisan" proponent of telecom immunity in the Senate carries the name Rockefeller. Every proposal that would seem to represent a reasonable compromise between encouraging telecom cooperation in the future (but see the point above about how they don't really have a choice when it's legal) and ensuring that misuse did not occur is dismissed without any real reasoning behind it, and always labeled "bipartisan." See, for example, see Jack Goldsmith's Minority Report-like argument in Slate a couple of days ago.

http://www.slate.com/id/2187870/

3. Both

I'm putting my money on 3.

It's also the Insurrection Act, which limits the use of the military. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act

The Rubber Stamp Congress amended it to basically allow the President to call out the miltary when he felt like it, but this Congress (in one of its few acts to undo its predecessor's harm) took that power away from Bush.