c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Having determined years ago that the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, we’re now having a tiff over whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might be.

There’s a school of thought _ I use the term loosely _ out there that would consider the implosion of the United States of America perfectly acceptable collateral damage if the enemy were defeated in the bargain.

The enemy is President Bush, just in case you hadn’t heard. And if sticking it to Bush requires giving terrorists a little breathing space, well, we can always play catch-up later, can’t we?

But even the president’s most rabid detractors have made their point without burning anything down, blowing anything up, shooting anyone or cutting off anyone’s head.

We don’t argue that way _ at least not often _ in this country. And when some nut does bomb an abortion clinic or shoot someone he finds politically disagreeable, almost all of us recognize right away that he’s the one with the problem.

It’s different in places where radical Islam is all the rage, and thus rage is all the rage, too. Churches are burning, rioters are sacking embassies and foam-flecked fatwas are flying in all directions. (So are travel advisories: Trust me _ you do not want to be a Dane in Damascus right now.)

The rage-mongers’ latest excuse for getting all cranked up is a few cartoons that a Danish newspaper ran, depicting the prophet Muhammad. Once the threats and violence started, other media outlets here and there _ mostly there _ ran the cartoons, too, probably to show that they weren’t going to be intimidated.

Or maybe they were just showing that they have no more respect for what Muslims revere than they have for what Christians revere. Christians have put up with far worse than cartoon Christs from the news and entertainment media since the days when the Romans fed them to the lions for fun.

Muslims have stricter rules about some things than Christians do. Dump a crucifix in a jar of urine and you’ll still find your embassy there the next morning, right where you left it. But if you create an image of Muhammad _ even a favorable or neutral image _ it offends Muslim sensibilities because it smacks of idolatry.

I can respect that. It makes sense on its own level. What doesn’t make sense is the reaction. It’s all out of proportion to the offense.

In fact, it’s crazy.

The question is whether it’s crazy enough to begin reawakening Americans to the threat they briefly understood after a different gaggle of insulted Muslims turned the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon to rubble, killing 3,000 innocents.

Which brings us back to our own little dust-up over Bush allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on overseas calls with suspected terrorist connections. How angry do you really want to get?

Some folks think the administration has overstepped. Others say the Constitution gives the guardians of national security the authority to monitor communications of foreign nationals for intelligence purposes, and the post-Sept. 11 force authorization from Congress reinforces that authority.

The FISA court and I find ourselves in the no-problem camp. “We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president’s constitutional power,” the court ruled in 2002.

Why would the FISA court take for granted and assume such things? Because of the presidential powers enumerated in the Constitution and decades of supporting case law. The administration doesn’t need a warrant to listen in on al-Qaida’s calls to and from people on U.S. soil.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS. STORY MAY END HERE)

Unfortunately, that intelligence well has probably run dry, now that we’ve seen it exposed by the oh-so-public-spirited New York Times and other media neutrals in the war on terror. The bad guys know we’re listening, so they’ll find other ways to communicate. The job of catching them is going to be harder from now on.

Rest assured, the eavesdropping storm will blow over, as it should, and the Bush haters will have to trump up something else in their seemingly eternal effort to make Al Gore president, retroactive to 2000. In the meantime, though, I offer them this moment of clarity:

The president you detest is trying to defeat people whose zeal to obliterate your civilization has been redoubled by a newspaper cartoon. Who scares you more?

MO PH END O’BRIEN

(Kevin O’Brien is deputy editorial director for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)