This is supposed to make us feel better?

It turns out that the most recent round of spying on Americans in their homes didn't start with the Bush Administration. In fact, much of the spying on you and your neighbors was started before George W. Bush issued his executive orders in violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution.

In the weeks after the September 11 attacks the NSA acted all on its own to begin monitoring telephone calls and e-mail messages between the United States and Afghanistan to track possible terror suspects and then broadened the eavesdropping operation to include other international communications and eventually domestic communications as they tapped into some of the nation's main telecommunications arteries to trace and analyze large volumes of phone and e-mail traffic to look for patterns of possible terrorist activity.

And they did all of this before George Bush issued any orders at all.

So now let's see if I've got the outline right:

George Bush says he's exempt from existing law because he's acting as commander in chief of his "War on Terror," even though war has never been declared by Congress.

And, Dick Cheney helpfully adds, it shouldn't matter anyway because we got it all wrong back in the Nixon era when we put a new restraints on presidential power.

Besides, there are bad people in the world who want to kill us and who hate us because we love freedom.

But, in the end, the joke's on us! It turns out, our very own government has been carrying out these illegal activities all along, we just didn't know about it.

I feel so much better. Let's switch the channel and see how those coal miners are doing.

Files Say Agency Initiated Growth of Spying Effort - New York Times