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SAVES LIVES? DO IT
By DEBRA BURLINGAME

DO you remember Rick Rescorla? He was the Morgan Stanley security chief who persistently warned Port Authority officials before the first World Trade Center bombing that the Twin Towers were vulnerable to terrorist attack. They didn't listen.

After six people died in the 1993 bombing, Rescorla repeatedly drilled employees on evacuation procedures. On 9/11, after the first jet slammed into Tower One at 8:46 a.m., he ignored the official order to send his workforce back to their desks in the south tower.

"Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse," he told a friend over the phone. "I'm getting my people the [expletive] out of here."

The 62-year-old Vietnam veteran grabbed a bullhorn and led hundreds of people out of the building, singing "God Bless America" to keep them from losing their nerve, going back again and again for stragglers.

He's credited with evacuating 2,700 people, but did not save himself.

Listening to members of Congress argue about the National Security Agency (NSA) terrorist-surveillance program brought Rescorla to mind. What would he think about all the dry legal arguments concerning the president's authority for intercepting al Qaeda conversations?

I think the decorated war hero would say, "If it'll it save my people, do it."

Missing in the debate over the program to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists without a warrant is the question of whether or not it works.

After The New York Times seized on an illegal leak to reveal the secret program's existence last month, Rep. Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and one of the "Gang of Eight" given a full briefing on the program, said, "I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilites."

Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence (appointed to his previous job as NSA director by President Bill Clinton), said — "unequivocally" — that we've gotten intelligence information that "otherwise would not be available."

A 2004 NBC report graphically illustrated what not having this program cost us 41/2 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."

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