The past is prologue...

...or, They damn well better be monitoring phone calls!

Best of the Web Today finds the NYT reminiscing with some of its heroes of yore, fools decent folks thought were long dead.

The recent debate about the security agency "does bring back a lot of memories," said Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president, who served on the Church Committee as a Democratic senator from Minnesota. "For those of us who went through it all back then, there's disappointment and even anger that we're back where we started from." . . .

Former Senator Gary W. Hart, a Colorado Democrat who served on the Church Committee, believes views such as Mr. Cheney's have set the clock back 30 years.

"What we're experiencing now, in my judgment, is a repeat of the Nixon years," Mr. Hart said. "Then it was justified by civil unrest and the Vietnam war. Now it's terrorism and the Iraq war."

One key difference between 1975 and 2006 seems to have escaped the Times and the Church Committee veterans. Then, the World Trade Center had been in operation for roughly five years; today, it has been a hole in the ground for almost as long. In today's New York Post, Debra Burlingame connects some dots:

A 2004 NBC report graphically illustrated what not having this program cost us 4 1/2 years ago. In 1999, the NSA began monitoring a known al Qaeda "switchboard" in Yemen that relayed calls from Osama bin Laden to operatives all over world. The surveillance picked up the phone number of a "Khalid" in the United States--but the NSA didn't intercept those calls, fearing it would be accused of "domestic spying."

After 9/11, investigators learned that "Khalid" was Khalid al-Mihdhar, then living in San Diego under his own name--one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. He made more than a dozen calls to the Yemen house, where his brother-in-law lived.

NBC news called this "one of the missed clues that could have saved 3,000 lives."

It is possible that the efforts of Mondale, Hart, et al., back in 1975 helped make possible the murders of Burlingame's brother, the pilot of Flight 77, and thousands of others. Obviously this wasn't their intent, but there's something awfully grating about their smug self-assurance that they were still right then, even in the wake of 9/11.