NY Times: 'Illegal' Spying OK Under Clinton

Last month, when the New York Times revealed to the world that the Bush administration had a top secret National Security Agency program that monitored communications between al Qaeda terrorists and their U.S.-based agents, it strongly condemned the operation as a dangerous and possibly illegal invasion of privacy.

However, the Old Gray Lady wasn't nearly as upset over a much broader surveillance program under the Clinton administration, which routinely monitored millions of phone calls between U.S. citizens without a court ordered warrant.

In fact, the paper called the blanket invasion of privacy a "necessity" - even though it was carried out without the justification provided by the 9/11 attacks.

The American Thinker web site has unearthed Times quotes from 1999, when the paper was reacting to reports on the NSA's Echelon project under Bill Clinton, which randomly trolled U.S. telecommunications looking for trouble.

"Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists," the Times explained helpfully.

The same report quoted an NSA official assuring Times readers "that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards.”

These days, however, the Old Gray Lady doesn't like to talk about Echelon. In the dozens of stories on the Bush NSA operation since reporter James Risen "broke" the story on December 16, the Times has mentioned the older NSA program only once.

In a December 22 report by Timesman Scott Shane, the paper dismissed "reports on an agency program called Echelon [asserting] that the agency and its counterparts in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia somehow intercepted all world communications," calling such claims "exaggerated."