Vindication for the Times?

Thirteen months ago, when the New York Times first broke the story, administration officials were absolutely adamant in defending its domestic eavesdropping program.

No way did they need judicial approval to listen in on conversations, President Bush and his top aides said, even though existing law allowed them to get a special court's retroactive blessing 72 hours after the fact. The Times was assailed as irresponsible. "The disclosure of this program is disgraceful," Bush said, "there's no doubt in my mind it is legal." Dick Cheney said it was "doubly disturbing" that the paper had won a Pulitzer for the story.

What's more, anyone who questioned whether warrantless surveillance flouted the Constitution was portrayed as not sufficiently serious about going after terrorists.

Now, not so much. The administration has done a 180 and said it will go back to the old system, this time seeking approval from a secret court. In other words, judges must approve the National Security Agency's eavesdropping on the basis of "probable cause" that one of the parties involved has terrorist ties--precisely the principle that the Bush team had insisted could not be breached.

The politics of this are perfectly clear. The Dems have taken over Capitol Hill, and the announcement came one day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to grill Alberto Gonzales . (Just a coincidence, Tony Snow says.)

What's more, a federal district judge had declared the spying program unconstitutional, and the administration was in the process of appealing.

So what are we to think? Did the administration cave, or was its earlier outrage politically calculated?

"A day after announcing that it had scrubbed a controversial warrantless surveillance program," says the Los Angeles Times, "the Bush administration refused to provide details to Congress of how a new court-review process for terror-related wiretaps would work, triggering a fresh round of complaints and suspicions from Democrats about what the administration was doing.

"At the same time, President Bush and other administration officials indicated that little had changed in the electronic eavesdropping program, originally launched after the Sept. 11 attacks, other than the fact that a court had finally blessed it."

Which again raises the question of why they couldn't have done this a year ago.

USA Today leads with the critics:

"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was grilled Thursday by senators who questioned why it took the Bush administration more than four years to allow a court to oversee the National Security Agency's electronic eavesdropping of Americans and others in terrorism investigations . . .