Reuters
January 3, 2006
by Steve Holland
President George W. Bush opened a 30-day push to gain renewal of the anti-terrorism USA Patriot Act on Tuesday with a partisan blast at Democrats and a meeting with U.S. prosecutors who called the law essential.
A temporary extension of the Patriot Act, reached in December to stop a Democratic filibuster blocking maneuver, expires February 3 and Bush is using the early days of the new year to press for permanent passage of the law.
He accused Democrats of blocking the law for "partisan reasons," and White House spokesman Scott McClellan was blunter, saying Democrats were putting politics ahead of national security.
"The enemy has not gone away. They're still there. And I expect Congress to understand that we're still at war, and they've got to give us the tools necessary to win this war," Bush said.
As part of his campaign, Bush brought to the White House 19 U.S. attorneys from around the country to help make his point that the law has been helpful to law enforcement.
Enacted in response to the September 11 attacks, the Patriot Act expanded the authority of the federal government to conduct secret searches, obtain private records and intercept telephone calls, among other activities, in order to track down suspected terror cells.
The extension was agreed on last month in order to give lawmakers more time to consider civil liberties protections.
The debate over whether some of the provisions infringe too much on civil liberties became more heated after the revelation that Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct a domestic eavesdropping operation on Americans with suspected ties to terrorism without seeking court approval.
The U.S. attorneys spoke to reporters after their meeting with Bush and cited several examples of cases where the provisions of the Patriot Act allowed them to break up plots to attack the United States and other criminal activity.
"We told him that we use it each and every day to protect our country against terrorists and criminals," said Ken Wainstein, U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.
The U.S. attorneys said they believed the civil liberties protections included in a compromise version of the bill agreed on by congressional negotiators were sufficient.
Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said the law was used to gain convictions of two people for funneling more than $20 million to al Qaeda and Hamas.
"Without the provisions of the Patriot Act we would not be have been able to build and prove this case against these two master terrorist financiers," she said.
