The Wall Street Journal Book Review

Gabriel Schoenfeld of the Hudson Institute reviewed Skating On Stilts for The Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

One of the biggest privacy battles began in June 2006 after the New York Times disclosed the highly classified CIA-Treasury program to monitor al Qaeda finances by way of the Belgium-based financial clearinghouse known as Swift. The program, an intelligence-gathering operation, was perfectly legal and was conducted with court-approved warrants. It had already facilitated the capture of the chief plotter of the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people.

The Times story obviously compromised the secret effort to monitor terrorist finances, and it spurred the European Commission to try to shut it down. "European privacy bureaucrats," Mr. Baker says, "crowed that they had crippled the American program." An infuriating irony, he adds, was that Europe's own efforts to collect and analyze hotel-registration data were "far more intrusive and less carefully constructed than Treasury's program."

What accounts for such behavior? Mr. Baker castigates civil libertarians of the left and right who, though blaming the government for its supposedly alarmist policies, were themselves alarmist about the policies' threat to liberty. Such people claimed, as Mr. Baker puts it, that "a frightened U.S. government . . . [launched] a seven-year attack on our privacy that a new administration is only slowly (too slowly, say the advocates) beginning to moderate." Mr. Baker tells a different story, of officials urgently trying to solve post-9/11 security problems while unfairly attacked at every turn.

Mr. Baker's argument is the more persuasive one, not least in the wake of recent events—in Fort Hood (Nidal Malik Hasan), in the skies over Detroit (Umar Abdulmutallab), in Times Square (Faisal Shahzad) and in the New York City subways (Najibullah Zazi). The Obama administration, to its credit, has left in place the policies that Mr. Baker fought for, and we are safer for it.

Click here to read the full review.
  

Comments

[Johanna sawyer]

Interesting book review, sounds like the book really clarifies what is happening regarding the threats we face. Since reading Steve Emerson years ago, I've long been curious about "the wall" issue, and how much energy is funneled into carefully denying its importance by liberals in the media.