Decision Points

played a role in several high-profile cases, such as the Zodiac gunman murders in California. The last thing I wanted was to allow the freedom and access to information provided by American libraries to be utilized against us by al Qaeda .
    Lawmakers recognized the urgency of the threat and passed the PATRIOT Act 98 to 1 in the Senate and 357 to 66 in the House. I signed the bill into law on October 26, 2001. “We took time to look at it, we took time to read it, and we took time to remove those parts that were unconstitutional and those parts that would have actually hurt liberties of all Americans,” Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said. His Democratic colleague, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, added, “If there is one key word that underscores this bill, it is ‘balance.’ In the new post–September 11 society that we face, balance is going to be a key word. … Balance and reason have prevailed.”
    Over the next five years, the PATRIOT Act helped us break up potential terror cells in New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Florida. In one example, law enforcement and intelligence authorities shared information that led to the arrest of six Yemeni Americans in Lackawanna, New York, who had traveled to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and met with Osama bin Laden . Five pled guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda. The other admitted to unlawful transactions with al Qaeda.
    Some claimed the Lackawanna Six and others we arrested were littlemore than “small-town dupes” with fanciful plots “who had no intention of carrying out terrorist acts.” I always wondered how the second-guessers could be so sure. After all, in August 2001, the idea that terrorists commanded from caves in Afghanistan would attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on U.S. commercial airplanes would have seemed pretty far-fetched. For me, the lesson of 9/11 was simple: Don’t take chances. When our law enforcement and intelligence professionals found people with ties to terrorist networks inside the United States, I would rather be criticized for taking them into custody too early than waiting until it was too late.
    As the freshness of 9/11 faded, so did the overwhelming congressional support for the PATRIOT Act . Civil liberties advocates and commentators on the wings of both parties mischaracterized the law as a stand-in for everything they disliked about the war on terror. Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, such as the authority to conduct roving wiretaps, were set to expire in 2005. I pushed hard for their re-authorization. As I told Congress, the threat had not expired, so the law shouldn’t, either.
    Lawmakers delayed and complained. But when they finally held a vote, they renewed the PATRIOT Act by a margin of 89 to 10 in the Senate and 251 to 174 in the House. In early 2010, key provisions of the PATRIOT Act were authorized again by the heavily Democratic Congress.
    My one regret about the PATRIOT Act is its name. When my administration sent the bill to Capitol Hill, it was initially called the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001. Congress got clever and renamed it. As a result, there was an implication that people who opposed the law were unpatriotic. That was not what I intended. I should have pushed Congress to change the name of the bill before I signed it.

    As part of the 9/11 investigation, we discovered that two hijackers who had infiltrated the United States, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi , had communicated with al Qaeda leaders overseas more than a dozen times before the attack. My immediate question was: Why hadn’t we intercepted the calls? If we had heard what Mihdhar and Hazmi were saying, we might have been able to stop the attacks of 9/11.
    The man with the answers was Mike Hayden , the three-star Air Force general who led the National Security Agency. If the intelligence community is the brains of national security, the NSA is part of the gray matter. The agency is filled with smart, techno-savvy experts and code breakers, along with analysts and linguists. Mike told me the NSA had the capability to monitor those al Qaeda phone calls into the United States before 9/11. But he didn’t have the legal authority to do it without receiving a court order, a process that could be difficult and slow.

    With General Mike Hayden.
White House/Eric Draper
    The reason was a law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Written in 1978, before widespread use of cell phones and the