i just like you saying the zazi plot. the first words we hear out of several members of congress and i believe clapper as well was this prism system foiled the zazi plot. it turns out us and the british police had actually raided apartments where we had found e-mails on the computers in just good old-fashioned police work that had helped stopped the plot. the question is when someone comes before you from offici officialdom and say this helped foil the plot, do you trust that person, if barack obama says it and you are a democrat, you re more inclined to believe it. we don t know how the british police found that house, found that computer. brits for all the outrage in europe are heavily buying in to this system. we ve just been piggybacking off the americans. i don t know if it is a democrat or republican thing, when katty kay says something about the british government, i tend to believe her.
am on-board with it. there is a tendency among some commentators to ridicule voters for thinking that way but that s pretty logical to navigate public life. you re saying people who are politically partisan are institutionalized. particularly when they have watched the transition of power from being on the outside to being on the inside. that s one of the fascinating stories here. it was easier for democrats to be much more skeptical of the national security state when they were not returning it. all of a sudden one of their own are running it of course. now there is mutual buy-in. it seems to me that there is a dimension here and it relates to this mutual buy. when the leaders come forth and say here are the plots that have been foiled by this information, is that not a powerful uniter that somehow gets goes above the parts divide you were just talking about? yes. but again, when a leaders comes forward and says the zazi plot.
do we know anything about the efficacy of these secret programs? i think the government is there are indications the government is preparing to release some new information today that would indicate that some of these program helped intercept plots, including the arrest of an alleged plotter named zazi several years ago. but you know, we have also heard from senators, including senator wyden of oregon, who are publicly now saying they are not convinced of the effectiveness of these program and of their necessity. you were also report really, washington post is reporting, 1,477 items last year from the prism program, for instance, that went into the president s daily briefing and it was remarked that that s large number. the new york times editorial this week, lashing out though at what has been happening. the president specifically, they said this, the administration has now lost all credibility on this issue, mr. obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will us
plots that were thwarted specifically by this prism program or the phone tapping program, and not just the overall patriot act? well, what law enforcement officials are pointing to is the case of naygy bulu zazi who was a coffee cart vendor who sent an e-mail to an address linked to senior al qaeda leaders asking about the recipe for a flour-based explosive. and that tripped off alarms and law enforcement officials pursued zazi and ultimately he pled guilty to plotting to bomb the new york subway system. when congress was debating an extension of the law, the fisa amendments act in december of last year, dianne feinstein went to the senate floor and said that the prism program had thwarted as many as eight
paradigm and that is we ve gone for more than a decade of al qaeda, al qaeda is running the plot, al qaeda affiliates are driving the plot, al qaeda lures the radical overseas, trains him as a bomb maker, zazi, the new york subway plot, shahzad, but when you go from al qaeda to al qaedaism, you have people who are self-starters just on the internet. they may never make contact or meet anybody from al qaeda. so now you re flying so far below the radar screen that it s an awful lot harder to prevent these plots in a sense because they re not tripping any of the trip wires that you pass when you make contact with others for help. there are two aspects to that that i would pick up with you. one is of course this link to dagestan may be much more sinister. we now know tamerlan, who had a wife and young baby here, decides to go back home for six