Fellow warriors of Allah:

We have some disturbing news today but do not let your hearts be troubled for we have much encouraging news.

I read the New York Times this weekend and it has come to our attention that our methods of rapidly changing phone numbers to ensure secure communications may not be efficient. It appears that the Americans have some method by which they can track and monitor our communications. This may be part of the reason why we have had no success over the past few years in attacking the American homeland. You will receive new instructions shortly so that we can avoid this threat to secure communications, which is essential for the success of our operations.

While this represents a temporary setback, there is much good news here. We have learned of this threat from the American newspapers and we can now adjust to this threat in the future. Just like when we learned in the American newspapers that the Americans were aware of Osama's satellite phone before the glorious 9-11 attacks and quickly changed our communication methods to protect our operations.

This also demonstrates the weakness of the Americans. Just read their newspapers! The fools are upset that their President might be spying on them! This is absolutely glorious and is certainly a gift from Allah. How else can you explain how Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton all abused their civil liberties – Clinton monitored communications without a warrant for economic espionage. But when their President now tries to use the same methods to spy on us, their politicians and newspapers criticize him. And this was a classified program that somehow got leaked to their newspapers! How else can you explain all this other than a glorious gift from Allah! He is watching us and encouraging us to continue our jihad and will ensure our success. These fools deserve to be destroyed for their foolishness and weakness alone.

Even more good news – the American government has suspended the Patriot Act. This is critical because we learned from the American papers how close they were to intercepting our operatives before the glorious 9-11 attacks from their hearings and a program they had called Able Danger. By suspending the Patriot Act, the sharing of information among their bloated bureaucracy is once again prevented. I think I heard one of the Americans refer to this as the “Gorelick wall” once. I think that has something to do with President Clinton. In any case, this dramatically increases our opportunities for success in future operations.

Look at the American fools. They whine in their newspapers that their President is attacking their freedoms by trying to spy on us. They are showing us how weak they are. This shows the opportunities that are available to us! We must continue to follow their politicians and newspapers and learn how to further exploit their weakness. Many of their politicians are calling on the Americans to remove their troops from Iraq. We must listen and observe them closely – their TV stations show pictures of all our bombings and drive these points home.

 

Praise Allah!

I learned from Benjamin Franklin's writings that some points are best made by satire.

Several points first about the history of Presidents and civil liberties.  Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus to deport someone who was an agitator.   From Rush's transcript today:

A former Ohio congressman, a man by the name of Clement Vallandigham called the prosecution of the Civil War wicked and cruel and he suggested that Lincoln and the Republican Party were using the Civil War to establish a dictatorship. Troops of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry seized Clement Vallandigham from his home in Dayton. A military commission tried him for treasonable utterances and turned him over to the confederate army. Jefferson Davis didn't want Vallandigham any more than Lincoln did and eventually shipped him off to Canada from where he managed to slip back into the United States. Abraham Lincoln lamented, "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?"

FDR rounded up 110,000 Japanese without judicial or legislative oversight and most Democrats view him as a hero and a model.  J. Edgar Hoover wiretapped Dr. Martin Luther King and some think that JFK authorized it. 

And we get to Clinton where he used the NSA to spy on communications for economic espionage without warrants.  Also millions of phone calls, emails and ATM transactions were monitored without warrants.  And how could we forget about the controversial Carnivore e-mail searching utility the FBI introduced during the Clinton Administration.

So with all this backdrop now what did Bush do?  The full details are not clear as this is (was) a classified program, but the President has explained that warrantless surveillance of international phone calls was authorized for individuals where there was a demonstrable link to terrorist organizations. 

I've commented in previous posts about the legality and precedent for this and linked to others who have as well.  Powerline has had several strong posts on this matter -- among them a post on the NSA survelliance and one on the Patriot Act and the Gorelick wall.

UPDATE:  The Democrats cheered when Harry Reid told them that the Patriot Act was defeated.  Chris Wallace of Fox News questions Sen. Reid about it.

UPDATE2:  Michelle Malkin has an outstanding roundup of some of the best of the blogosphere regarding the NSA survelliance.

UPDATE3:  Johnathan Alter has an absolutely disgusting piece in Newsweek, where he sells his uniformed opinion that the survelliance was illegal and that the only reason Bush tried to stop the story was to prevent embrassment.  What was his reasoning?  That 3 days after the Times article he couldn't find any evidence that disclosing the program is helping the enemy.  What a jerk.  Let's give him top secret clearance so that we can show him the evidence and he can disclose more secrets.

Just as scarry is all the lib bloggers writing about this article who are following the uninformed Alter like lemmings.  Fortunately, Rick Moran has a good rebuttal:  Johnathan Alter Is a Pig.

UPDATE4:  John McIntyre at Real Clear Politics also takes a shot at Johnathan Alter (hat tip: Michelle Malkin)