Patriot Act terror protection

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"We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night," Sen. John Kerry told Iowa voters last Dec. 1. "So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time."

Characteristically, Mr. Kerry now denounces the Patriot Act, although he voted for it. "Most of [the Patriot Act] has to do with improving the transfer of information between CIA and FBI, and it has to do with things that really were quite necessary in the wake of what happened on September 11," Mr. Kerry bragged to New Hampshirites on Aug. 6, 2003.

Unlike the Tumbleweed-in-Chief, members of the new Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law unswervingly advocate the Patriot Act as a shield against homicidal Islamofascism.

"We write to express our strong support for the U.S.A. Patriot Act and concern about misinformation about the necessary legal tools it provides to battle al Qaeda and other terrorist enemies," states a Sept. 23 letter to congressional leaders signed by former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch, ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, actor Ron Silver and 66 other leading Americans.

By boosting penalties for terrorism, dragging analog-era surveillance laws into the digital age and tearing down the wall that divided American spies from cops, the Patriot Act has helped thwart numerous terrorist conspiracies:

c The FBI began watching the Lackawanna Six al Qaeda cell in the summer of 2001. Separate teams probed their suspected drug and terrorist violations.

According to Justice's July "Report from the Field: The U.S.A. Patriot Act at Work," "there were times when the intelligence officers and the law-enforcement agents concluded that they could not be in the same room." Under the Patriot Act, these officials exchanged data, pooled resources and jailed all six Upstate New York terrorists for pro-al Qaeda subterfuge.

c In the Portland Seven case, the Patriot Act let the FBI follow one terrorist's plan to attack domestic Jewish targets while other conspirators tried to reach Afghanistan to help al Qaeda and the Taliban battle American GIs. The FBI and prosecutors jointly imprisoned six extremists, while Pakistani troops killed their comrade.

• The Palestinian Islamic Jihad Eight were indicted for materially supporting foreign terrorists. Earlier, the Patriot Act let the supervising federal judge quickly issue a search warrant in another jurisdiction, rather than consume time involving a local jurist.

c As Dick Morris recalled in the Sept. 12 New York Post, under the Patriot Act, federal intelligence agents in March 2003 gave information to the New York Police Department squeezed from al Qaeda honcho Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM).