What surveillance might have heard

I wrote last month about the controversy over surveillance by the U.S. authorities of phone calls made to abroad. The Chicago Tribune has a crucial new piece of information that should frame any such debate. According to a classified report from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel seen by the newspaper, "206 international telephone calls were known to have been made by the leaders of the [9/11] hijacking plot after they arrived in the United States--including 29 to Germany, 32 to Saudi Arabia and 66 to Syria." Interestingly, and somewhat worryingly too, 54 months to the day after 9/11 "the hijackers' connections to Saudi Arabia and Syria are far from fully explained." If these calls could have been intercepted, the plot that resulted in the atrocities om New York and Washington - and which intended an assault on either the Congress on Capitol Hill or the White House - might have been avoided. But the key lesson is that president Bush's instinct was right: the surveillance statute was insufficient for the new war. He wasn't right, however, to fail for so long to put the required changes on a secure legal footing.