Chris says: "Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence in the US, recently claimed that a temporary electronic-surveilliance law that gives 'the U.S. intelligence community broad new powers to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications overseas without seeking warrants from the surveillance court' helped to stop a terror plot in Germany. Au contraire, the plot was actually discovered months before the law was even created, and it was done so by US military guards; no wiretapping involved."
McConnell's testimony that the new law helped in the German case was especially striking–since it seemed to contradict public statements by American and German officials about how the plot was exposed. About 10 months ago–long before the new law was put into effect–guards at a U.S. military base near Frankfurt noted a suspicious individual conducting surveillance outside the facility. U.S. military officials tipped off German authorities, who quickly identified the individual and several accomplices as militants affiliated with the Islamic Jihad Union, a violent Al Qaeda-linked group. The Germans kept the group under surveillance for months and discovered evidence that the militants–some of whom had been to an Islamic Jihad Union training camp in Pakistan–were assembling chemicals for bombing attacks on American military installations in Germany. (The U.S. Embassy in Berlin issued a public warning last April that it had received intelligence reporting about threats against U.S. personnel in that country.) One U.S. intelligence official described the law-enforcement operation as a case of "good old-fashioned police work."
