22 JAN 07 / "President Ends Warrantless Surveillance"

In an apparent attempt to quell increasing opposition in a Democrat-controlled Congress, the Bush administration last week abruptly ended the warrantless surveillance program that was being conducted by the National Security Agency, notifying the Senate Judiciary Committee of the decision a few days before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was scheduled to testify on the subject of habeas corpus for enemy combatants.

The president decided to implement a new surveillance program under the aegis of the secret Foreign Intelligence Court. The NSA will have the authority to conduct domestic surveillance of suspected terrorists as long as there the agency can demonstrate probable cause under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

This is a political victory for the Democrats. NSA and other agencies are tasked with preventing worst case scenarios. Yet Democrats in Congress wanted to make the job even more difficult by taking away the most powerful tool at their disposal. News of the surveillance program broke when a confidential letter from Senator John Rockefeller to Vice President Cheney was made public, but there was little evidence that the privacy rights of American citizens were actually violated.

Since much of the details surrounding the new plan are classified, we can only hope that that judicial review does not hinder intelligence collection and allow Islamic terrorists to carry out an attack on U.S. soil.

There's no question that if another terrorist attack were to occur on this president's watch, the Democrats undoubtedly would be asserting that more could have been done to prevent it.

Despite the controversy surrounding the warrantless surveillance program, the president never lost sight of the fact that his primary responsibility is to protect the American people. Unfortunately, he receives little credit for this in public opinion polls.

Presidents should do what's right, not what's popular.