Articles

The authors of the Patriot Act always intended that its provisions would be Permanent. The politically expedient thing to do would have been to include a Sunset provision, to acknowledge a temporary moment of crisis that required Special Measures for prosecutors to pursue terrorists. But the lawyers wanted no sunsets; some of them had been working Al Qaeda cases since the first World Trade Center bombing and imagined a long-term struggle that could last a generation. “I said, ‘Don’t think of this as an emergency measure,’ ” Viet Dinh recalled on July 20. At the time, Dinh was an assistant Attorney General under John Ashcroft and was tasked on the morning of September 12 with writing a bill to fix whatever Laws might impede investigation. The scholarship provided little guidance for how to make Terror investigations easier, so Dinh sent an e-mail to the nation’s U.S. attorneys and FBI agents, asking for ideas. G-Men are not Constitutional lawyers…