FISA, terrorism, and Bush ineptness

Republicans never tire of citing the fact that there have been no terrorist attacks in the United States as evidence that President Bush has made us safer. What I've never understood is why nobody sane draws the obvious inference from this that we aren't in a lot of danger. The fact that there's been no new attacks in six years says nothing about Bush's security policy, which is one of the most roundly criticized and obviously flawed security policies in the long history of security policies. If America really was in mortal danger of terrorist attacks, then those attacks would be more--not less--likely under George Bush.

If I'm right, though--and we all know I am!--then I think it's important to readdress, well, almost every post-9/11 national-security policy we've instituted. Starting with FISA, Josh Patashnik writes:

it would have been preferable to have had the compromise version of the FISA reform legislation signed into law, and that the Bush administration deserves condemnation for playing chicken by threatening to veto any version other than its own. But because Congress waited so long to take up the issue, the choice Democratic leaders on the Hill ended up facing was between passing the Bush bill or risk leaving town without fixing FISA at all, leaving the intelligence community out to dry. My point was that it's a pretty close call which of those two options is less desirable, which is why some equivocation and hand-wringing is in order before one condemns Democrats in Congress for doing what they did.

The compromise version of the FISA reform did one thing--something even sensible members of the national security establishment find uncontroversial. It authorized the NSA to tap into the phone calls of alleged terrorists as long as both suspects were in foreign countries. The version that was implemented indirectly authorizes wiretapping just about any combination of people you can think of and puts the Justice Department in charge of making sure the administration doesn't abuse its privileges. That' a pretty stark trade off. So stark, in fact, that I think it's fairly clear that it would have been better policy to let FISA reforms wait a month than to cede all this power to George Bush. If our country was under deadly threat all the time, and we had elected a responsible president who could be trusted not to abuse powers like these, even temporarily, then Josh would have a fine point. But, of course, what we actually have is the exact opposite of this, which is exactly why FISA has become a politicized issue in the first place, and why the reforms the Democrats allowed are unequivocally regrettable.