I am angry, tonight. Very angry indeed.
October 15, 2007 — WASHINGTON -(NY Post) [1] U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year, The Post has learned.
…In the early hours of May 12, seven U.S. soldiers – including Spc. Jimenez – were on lookout near a patrol base in the al Qaeda-controlled area of Iraq called the “Triangle of Death.”
Sometime before dawn, heavily armed al Qaeda gunmen quietly cut through the tangles of concertina wire surrounding the outpost of two Humvees and made a massive and coordinated surprise attack.Four of the soldiers were killed on the spot and three others were taken hostage.
A search to rescue the men was quickly launched. But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers – obeying strict U.S. laws about surveillance – cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.
Starting at 10 a.m. on May 15, according to a timeline provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence, lawyers for the National Security Agency met and determined that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.
For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the “probable cause” necessary for the attorney general to grant such “emergency” permission.
Finally, approval was granted and, at 7:38 that night, surveillance began.
“The intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law,” a senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case told The Post.
And why did these people get abandoned? Here’s a quote I posted yesterday, which will explain the whole thing:
We have a thing in this damn country called a Constitution and it supposed to be followed.
I’d like to issue a challenge to the creature calling himself Chuck Adkins [2], the author of the quote above, to address himself to the families of those soldiers as to why he thinks his myopic reading of the constitution, is of greater import than the lives of those who were lost… while defending these United States, and it’s interests, while we danced around the question of how many lawyers can dance on the head of a wiretap law.
[3]“This is terrible. If they would have acted sooner, maybe they would have found something out and been able to find my son,” said Jimenez’s mother, Maria Duran. “Oh my God. I just keep asking myself, where is my son? What could have happened to him?”
Go ahead, Chuck… have you got an answer for this woman? We’d like to hear it. Look in the face of the solider, and explain it to him, and to us.
BBCT: Memorandum [4] and to Michelle [5]