Patriot Act needs to be removed or else you disarm law enforcement against terrorists.
You need wiretaps to track terrorists in the u.s, you need to be able to obtain hotel records if you believe a terrorist is in a city.
Either the patriot act will be restored to stop attacks or it will be restored to stop attacks.
The terrorists have scored huge victory in the last few days. No more waterboarding to get info out of them, no more wiretaps, no more tracking down info of them in u.s hotels.
If I was in law enforcement I would resign this congress has abandoned them. Why should they get the blame when they have been disarmed.
If I were Bush I would resign saying he can't as president continue to constitutionally protect u.s citezens as he pledged to do if congress is not giving him that power.
It's not as though law enforcement doesn't have the power to do any of these things at all without the Patriot Act. To the extent that it may have enhanced those abilities, is there any indication that they would have prevented 9/11? As I alluded to earlier, the FBI had failed to make effective use of the powers it already had prior to the attack. We had Condi Rice after the attack making the breathtakingly implausible claim that it never occurred to anyone in government that terrorists might fly a plane into a building. $30 billion annual budget for the CIA, and it never occurred to anyone. These are the problems that need to be addressed.