Listening in a little early

Court filings in the breach of privacy case regarding President Bush's illegal domestic wire tapping program claim it was started before 9/11.

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

Will this make the right stop defending President Bush's domestic spy program? If this was a program under President Clinton, Fox news would have created a whole new batch of flashy graphics just to talk about it. It would probably have a banner along the bottom that said "Constitution Under Attack!" or something similar.

It will be interesting to see how Fox News tries to spin this since it will be tough to argue that the Bush Administration was doing it to try to prevent an attack without making it look like they had enough intelligence warning them of an attack, but didn't do the right things to stop it. That would only feed into the conspiracy theories out there.

Fox News and the Republicans may even try to blame this on Clinton since the initial project was started in 2000 according to the NSA. However, the plaintiffs in the case say the call monitoring was a "different component" of that project. In other words, once President Bush's team got in there, the project changed direction.

Bloomberg News has the story here.