Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

While the New York Times is reporting on this as if it is some kind of controversy--which it is not. This is a time of war, and Presidents have often issued Executive Orders that while not widely popular have been for the sake of national security. Perhaps one of the most germane executive orders to mention was that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066, signed on February 19, 1942. It was this order that directed military commanders:

....to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent s he or the appropriate Military Commanders may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with such respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.

This was the order that permitted the internment of the Japanese. When the opinion of legal advisers was sought, they concluded:

...in time of national peril any reasonable doubt must be resolved in favor of action to preserve the national safety, not for the purpose of punishing those who liberty may be temporarily affected by such action, but for the purpose of protecting the freedom of the nation which may be long impaired, if not permanently lost, by non action...

While this action to this day receives harsh criticism, it was without doubt in the best of interest of national security. Today, the New York Times has compromised our national security by callously making public the order by President Bush to permit eavesdropping of international phone calls without court-approved warrants. Sadly, it is beginning to look like the Times had another motive besides undermining the war on terror, but served as a tie-in to a new book by the very same James Risen called "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." The New York Times article published yesterday can be found in Risen's new book.

I have but no doubt this breach of national security will not be seen as a "big deal" to the liberal media and Democrats at large--national security is hardly a matter they wish to concern themselves with--the Plame ordeal is of larger concern to them. None of them will seek to reprimand the New York Times for blatantly compromising national security, which Risen's article clearly does.

No one can prove that Valerie Plame was deliberated outted for political purposes, but it is undeniable that Risen and the New York Times have willfully undermined national security.