The Bad Guys Won't Be Calling

Daniel Henninger, who was an eyewitness to the carnage in New York on 9/11, writes today in the Wall Street Journal about the demise of the terrorist surveillance program thanks to leaks about the program:

Let's start with the one thing we know for sure about the Bush administration's program to listen to al Qaeda's phone calls into and out of the United States: It's dead.

After all the publicity of the past two weeks, does anyone think that the boys working on plans for Boston Harbor, the Golden Gate Bridge or Chicago's Loop are still chatting by phone? If the purpose of the public exposure was to pull the plug on the pre-emptive surveillance program, mission accomplished. Be safe, Times Square.

At the least, al Qaeda's operatives in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Hamburg and the U.S. will hold off phoning in the next mass-murder plan until the U.S. Senate finishes deliberating Arlen Specter's proposal to legislatively order up an opinion from the judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, est. 1978, as to whether the antiterrorist wiretap program violates the law that created their jobs.

Read the whole thing - and thank you, New York Times.