Occassionally sprinkled with liberal perspectives, overall this Newsweek article on the NSA flap is reasonably good!.

The talk at the White House in the days and weeks after 9/11 was all about suitcase nukes and germ warfare and surprise decapitation strikes.
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The message to White House lawyers from their commander in chief, recalls one who was deeply involved at the time, was clear enough: find a way to exercise the full panoply of powers granted the president by Congress and the Constitution. If that meant pushing the boundaries of the law, so be it. The Bush administration did not throw away the Bill of Rights in the months and years that followed; indeed, NEWSWEEK has learned, ferocious behind-the-scenes infighting stalled for a time the administration’s ambitious program of electronic spying on U.S. citizens at home and abroad.
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Though the choice is rarely stated—or perhaps even conscious—a president will almost always choose to violate individual rights over the risk of losing a war. When the French threatened American sovereignty on the high seas in 1798, John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, blatantly punishing free speech as traitorous. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus (the rule giving citizens a right to take their grievances to court). During World War I, Woodrow Wilson allowed officials to prosecute anyone for criticizing the government. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt allowed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to promiscuously wiretap, and ordered Japanese-Americans placed in internment camps. As the Vietnam War dragged on and domestic dissent arose, Richard Nixon—citing his Demo-cratic predecessors FDR and Lyndon Johnson—authorized bugging and wiretapping against domestic “subversives.” None of these steps, it should be pointed out, made the nation appreciably safer.

As you will note in the last little jab, there is nothing to support the conclusion that none of these acts had any impact. But hey, it is progress.

It is still not clear how far President Bush went after 9/11 to ramp up the national-security machine. Clearly the president wanted to unleash the intelligence services as well as the military, which had grown cautious after Vietnam and Watergate. The full dimensions of this secret program have only slowly leaked out. The legal justification, in addition to the commander in chief’s warmaking power under the Constitution, was a congressional resolution that was shouted through in September 2001, three days after the attacks.

It is not a bad job. It could be a lot better. There are frivolous and unfounded liberal assumptions through out, but the general tone is informative and realistic about the how the threat of attack required changes in our national posture.

The end, sadly, falls prey to liberal fantasy in the form of speculation:

There is a risk that Bush will overplay his hand. Some White House insiders have been urging the hardliners to take a less confrontational stance, if only for tactical reasons. The courts generally give great deference to the executive branch on national-security questions, but there have been signs of restiveness lately even among the president’s staunchest supporters on the federal bench. The Supreme Court is signaling in subtle and complex ways that it may rein in the Bush team’s absolutists by, for instance, requiring that detainees be afforded more legal rights.

The American public may be less than sympathetic to the targets of the Bush antiterror crackdown. But if the administration is shown to have violated the civil liberties of mainstream peace groups or (heaven forbid!) members of the press, the outcry could produce an overreaction. After the reformers got through with the intelligence community post-Watergate, Richard Nixon acerbically commented, “They cut the balls off the CIA.” He was not entirely exaggerating. The investigations and reforms of the 1970s and 1980s unquestionably made CIA officials in the 1990s more risk averse.

Emphasis mine. It is clearly evident the far left is now overplaying their hand by calling for the impeachment of a President who is simply monitoring those planning to attack us. It is also more likely the American people will have zero sympathy for a press that fears they may be monitored in their discussions with the terrorists more than what their terrorists are capable of doing.

And it is becoming clear what the real reason is behind the press being all upset and emotional. Of all the people in the US the press are the ones most likely to be attempting to contact terrorists in order to get their ‘scoop’! That is why the press is so animated. They know they are in the group of people who are in contact with our enemies and being monitored. Well, that is a risk they take when they try and get the next Pulitzer.