That was quite a moment when Attorney General Mukasey appeared yesterday at San Francisco, we gather from the dispatch by our Josh Gerstein. The general was making a plea for broad surveillance authority in the war on terror, warning, as Mr. Gerstein paraphrased him, “that the price for failing to empower the government will be paid in American lives.” He argued that officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safehouse in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

That was the point, Mr. Gerstein reported, that the attorney general “grimaced, swallowed hard and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. ‘We got three thousand … We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that.'” Mr. Gerstein pointed out that at the time of the attacks Mr. Mukasey was chief judge at the federal court house a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. He said in his speech yesterday on the coast that the bench did little to prepare him to deal with the daily briefing he receives about the threat to America. “It is way beyond, way beyond anything that I knew or believed. So, if I was picked for the level of my knowledge of what I actually see, that was a massive piece of false advertising,” he said. “There’s a lot going on out there.”

The attorney general, incidentally, said that the tactic of profiling Muslims isn’t used at airports, but, Mr. Gerstein reported he used “blunt language to defend extra scrutiny the Justice Department gives to militant Islamic groups. “So far as focusing investigations, we investigate where the threat is coming from. The threat is coming from Islamist extremism. It’s not coming from Calvinism,” the attorney general said. “We’d be out of our minds, not to mention the waste of resources, to look everyplace simply in the name of being correct.” Mr. Gerstein said the attorney general added that religion is never the sole basis for an investigation. “We don’t look at Muslims simply because they’re Muslims. That doesn’t happen,” he said.

It’s hard to recall a moment when we have heard this combination of emotion, logic, and straightforwardness in an attorney general, and we mention it because it’s an approach that will resonate for New Yorkers and, we’d like to think, all Americans. It’s well to remember that Mr. Mukasey knows whereof he speaks when it comes to profiling. When he was a judge, one of the terrorists brought before him tried to force him to recuse himself because he is Jewish. It didn’t work, and the circuit court supported him right down the line. These columns issued an early call for Mr. Mukasey to be nominated to our nation’s top law enforcement post, and we got a glimpse yesterday of the character that made us, and many others, feel that way.