USA Patriot and Terrorism Preventio Reauthorization Act of 2005
USA PATRIOT AND TERRORISM PREVENTION REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - July 21, 2005)
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Mr. McCAUL of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) for his leadership on this important legislation, and I rise today in support of this bill.
I served in the Justice Department before and after 9/11. I led the Department's counterterrorism efforts in the United States Attorney's Office in the State of Texas. I worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Forces fighting this war on terror in the trenches. I know firsthand that this PATRIOT Act provides the necessary tools to win this war on terror at home.
Significantly, the PATRIOT Act tore down the wall between the criminal division and the intelligence side of the house. Prior to this it was dysfunctional. The left hand literally did not know what the right was doing. The Ð9/11 Commission reported this wall may have contributed to 9/11. An FBI agent testified that efforts to conduct a criminal investigation into two of the hijackers were blocked due to concerns over the wall. Frustrated, he wrote to the FBI headquarters and he said, some day someone will die. And wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective at throwing every resource we had at certain problems. Let us hope that the national security law unit will then stand behind their decisions, especially since the biggest threat to us now is Osama Bin Laden.
Today, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, this wall has come down. It helps us connect the dots by removing the legal barriers that prevented law enforcement and the Intelligence Community from sharing information.
But the PATRIOT Act provides many other tools for law enforcement in this war on terrorism. It updates the law to the technology of today. The PATRIOT Act also takes laws which have long applied in drug cases and organized crime cases and applies them to the terrorists, such as the roving wiretaps, such as the delayed notification for searches. It makes no sense for us to apply these laws only in drug cases and not in the most important cases affecting our national security, cases involving terrorists. And contrary to critics' assertions, the Justice Department cannot do anything without court supervision. The U.S. PATRIOT Act does not abrogate the role played by the judiciary in the oversight of the activities of Federal law enforcement.
And while we are talking about libraries, let us not forget al Qaeda operative Mohammed Babar who used a computer in a library and when asked after he was arrested why, he said because the libraries will scrub the hard drives.
I can envision no bigger national security mistake than to go back to the way things were. We owe it to the citizens of this country to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, for if we do not and another terrorist attack occurs on our shores we will surely all be held accountable.
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