Donna Hanover's Ex – yes, the gentleman who announced his divorce via a press conference – today lent his name to an op-ed piece in the Times notable for its sheer disingenuousness, vapidity and dishonesty.

Yesterday the Senate failed to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, as a Democratic-led filibuster prevented a vote. This action - which leaves the act, key elements of which are due to expire on Dec. 31, in limbo - represents a grave potential threat to the nation's security.

There's some sleight of hand in this paragraph. As the Center for American Progress notes here, the bill currently before the Senate is not the one sent into conference committee with unanimous approval last July. That legislation contained a number of revisions to better safeguard civil liberties – but the relevant provisions were stripped, in conference, from the bill now on the Senate floor. American Progress further notes that the bipartisan filibuster group in the Senate had offered to delay the sunsetting of the Act for three months, so as to allow some time for negotiation. This solution was rejected by both Bill Frist and the White House, setting the stage for the filibuster. It's fair to assume that Giuliani knows this background.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made clear that the old rules no longer work. The terrorists who attacked us seek to kill innocent men, women and children of all races and creeds. They seek to destroy our liberties.

Actually, it's pretty well established that Al Qaeda isn't so much concerned with, say, the wall of separation, search and seizure provisions, the right to trial by jury, or freedom of speech as they are with U.S. support for the governments of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan and Israel, not to mention the Iraq war. Again: Giuliani, who is not always and exclusively a dimwitted mouthpiece-for-hire like some commentators on Fox, knows this. It's also arguable that the freedoms used here as an example are under sustained attack, but not by the still-at-large Osama bin Laden, but by Giuliani's own party.

In October 2001, after six weeks of intense scrutiny and debate, Congress passed the Patriot Act overwhelmingly (98 to 1 in the Senate and 356 to 66 in the House).

What Rudy neglects to mention is that a key part of that debate was over sunsetting provisions. The Patriot Act in full has 387 single-spaced pages; and as John Conyers said in Fahrenheit 9/11, " Sit down, my son. We don't read most of the bills." The simple but unavoidable truth is that the Act was passed in what amounted to a fit of Congressional panic, after the 9/11 attacks and during the anthrax attacks on the Capitol.

We had already received clear signals about our enemies' intentions, in the first attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole two years after that. Despite the abundance of warning signs, it took Sept. 11 to wake us to the dangers we face.

The implication of this paragraph is, of course, that the country did not take terrorism seriously as a threat until 9/11. That is nonsense, no matter how often it has been repeated to the audiences of Fox News and freerepublic.com. The Clinton administration took terrorism and Al Qaeda very seriously indeed, while the incoming Bush regency did not, with effects that a quick glance downtown confirms. Further confirmation can be had, for example, from Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, both former high officials in the Bush White House with whom Giuliani is personally acquainted.

The central provisions of the Patriot Act allow law enforcement and the intelligence community to share information. This might seem elementary, but for years law enforcement had been stymied by a legal wall that prevented agencies from sharing information. For four years now, inter-agency collaboration, made possible by the Patriot Act, has played an important role in preventing another day like Sept. 11. The act's provisions helped make possible the investigations in Lackawanna, N.Y., and Portland, Ore., in which 12 people were ultimately convicted for attempts to aid Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That's all very well and good, but information-sharing isn't at issue in the filibuster. Nor was the legal framework under which agencies could, and did, share intelligence a proximate cause of September 11th. It's merely convenient to raise that canard, because the policy in question, stemming from the Ford administration, was last updated by the Clinton administration. It's also noteworthy that, contrary to Giuliani's assertion, the prosecutions he refers to were not for terrorism-related offenses, but for far lesser charges, such as visa violations. No case brought under the Patriot Act has ever won in court.

So what happened in Washington? The House voted on Wednesday to renew the act; it stalled in the Senate. If the Senate fails to approve the extension, the government will be forced to revert in many ways to our pre-Sept. 11 methods. Sixteen provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire on Dec. 31, including the key information-sharing ones.

As noted above, the Senate was willing to extend the life of the Act for three months, more than enough time to come to an agreement. The government is not being forced to do anything.

Concerns have been raised about the so-called library records provision; the bill adds safeguards. The same is true for roving wiretaps, "sneak and peek" searches and access to counsel and courts, as well as many others concerns raised by groups like the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU doesn't seem too impressed by Rudy's arguments, judging by the scathing condemnation of the current legislation on their web site. Certainly, if the objective is to please the ACLU, that goal has not been met. Presumably, Giuliani is also aware that the "liberal" ACLU has been working closely with the American Conservative Union (ACU) to fight against the Patriot Act. Given that Giuliani lobbied to address the ACU's annual conference in February of this year, even offering to waive his usual $100,000 speaker's fee, it's likely that he's familiar with that organization's activities. So why doesn't he mention the significant and vocal conservative opposition to the Patriot Act?

There's something deeply wrong when an entire op-ed can't withstand even the most cursory examination. Credibility doesn't come cheap, but as Giuliani has demonstrated, it can be used as a very expendable commodity. One can only hope that the media do some fact-checking of their own with this dishonest apologia.

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