Notes about wiretapping...

I heard this on Rush Limbaugh today, and I don't know if he was quoting someone else or if it was his own observation. To paraphrase:

The part of the Constitution making it illegal for the President to wiretap is right next to the part that guarantees a woman's right to an abortion.

Viewed in the context of the Democrat's twisted interpretation of the Constitution, it seems on point.

Debra Burlingame, whose brother was the pilot on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, defends the president's anti-terror eavesdropping in convincing fashion:

A 2004 NBC report graphically illustrated what not having this program cost us 4 1/2 years ago. In 1999, the NSA began monitoring a known al Qaeda "switchboard" in Yemen that relayed calls from Osama bin Laden to operatives all over world. The surveillance picked up the phone number of a "Khalid" in the United States--but the NSA didn't intercept those calls, fearing it would be accused of "domestic spying."
After 9/11, investigators learned that "Khalid" was Khalid al-Mihdhar, then living in San Diego under his own name--one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. He made more than a dozen calls to the Yemen house, where his brother-in-law lived.
NBC news called this "one of the missed clues that could have saved 3,000 lives."

The inconsistencies of the Democratic approach to fighting terrorism seem so plain.

Finally, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales provides more support for the program in today's Wall Street Journal:

After Sept. 11, Congress immediately confirmed the president's constitutional authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those "those nations, organizations, or persons he determines" responsible for the attacks. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) gave the president the latitude to use a full complement of tools and tactics against our enemy. A majority of Supreme Court justices have concluded that the AUMF authorizes the president to use "fundamental and accepted" incidents of military force in our armed conflict with al Qaeda. The use of signals intelligence--intercepting enemy communications--is a fundamental incident of waging war.

Here's to winning the war.