If a terrorist calls in a forest...

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "'The Sept. 11 hijackers made dozens of telephone calls to Saudi Arabia and Syria in the months before the attacks, according to a classified report from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel,' the Chicago Tribune reports:

According to the report, 206 international telephone calls were known to have been made by the leaders of the hijacking plot after they arrived in the United States--including 29 to Germany, 32 to Saudi Arabia and 66 to Syria.

These are calls between al Qaeda terrorists and their associates, in which one side of the call is in the U.S. and the other is in another country--that is, just the kind of call the National Security Agency listened to under the terrorist surveillance program. Had such a program existed in 2001, it might have prevented 9/11--but if some journalists and Democrats are scandalized now, imagine how they would have howled in outrage if 9/11 hadn't happened."