Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.

"It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. "There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists."

-- MIMI HALL

There was a time when federal prosecutors would consistently win terrorism prosecutions.

From 1993 to 2001, prosecutors in Manhattan convicted some three dozen terrorists through guilty pleas and in six major trials.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government’s track record has been decidedly spottier, and its failure to obtain a single conviction on Monday in its terrorism-financing prosecution of what was once the nation’s largest Islamic charity was another in a series of missteps and setbacks.

-- ADAM LIPTAK and LESLIE EATON

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged . . . that the United States mishandled the case of a Canadian engineer seized by U.S. officials and taken to Syria, where he and the Canadian government say he was tortured.

Rice, speaking at a congressional hearing, said the Bush administration has told Canada "that we will try to do better in the future."

"We do not think that this case was handled as it should have been. We do absolutely not wish to transfer anyone to any place in which they might be tortured," she said.

When asked whether the U.S. relied on diplomatic assurances from Syria that the engineer, Maher Arar, would not be tortured, Rice said she would respond later because her memory of certain details "has faded a bit."

-- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Just so we're clear, the debate isn't between passing some potentially sensible modifications to the FISA legislation and doing nothing. The debate is between letting George Bush own the debate or not. Here's what's going on:

George Bush says "Give me everything I want, including retroactive immunity for telecom companies for breaking the law or I'll veto it."

Democrats then have a choice. They can send him more reasonable legislation, at which point he vetoes it and says the Democrats are going to let Al Qaeda eat your babies. Subsequently, they can either point out that George Bush vetoed the anti-Al Qaeda baby cannibalism bill or they can scamper like cowards and give him everything he wants.

Or they can just give him everything he wants right away.

This isn't about sensible FISA adjustments, this is about whether George Bush gets the power to do whatever the hell he wants because the Democrats in Congress think the best way to be strong is cave into the bullying of Mr. 24%.

-- ATRIOS

No one argues that the Bush administration's plans to install missile defense systems in Europe by the first of next decade is, on its own, a direct military threat to Russia. The entire system is comprised of 10 missile interceptors in Poland and an associated tracking X-band radar system in the Czech Republic - hardly enough to neutralize Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent.

But Russian apprehensions about the proposal are more long term. If Poland and the Czech Republic grant the US their soil for a missile defense system, it merely sets a precedent that could provide a pretext for future expansion: 10 interceptors could become 20, and 20 into 40.

Of equal importance is the political significance that the US-Eastern European collaboration symbolizes: the first American military presence in Poland and the expansion of US influence on Russia's periphery. It is the consolidation of Washington's alliance relationships on the greater portion of the European continent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absorption of Eastern Europe into the US security umbrella. Vladimir Putin, of all Russian leaders, is certainly one to see the developments through this prism.

That is why the latest offers to accommodate Russian sensitivities to missile defense in the Eastern European theatre have simply missed the point.

-- MATT DUPUIS