Thanks to rachelrachel for bringing to our attention this American Prospect article by Nicolas Confessore, In Bed With Bob Barr , The American Prospect vol. 12 no. 19, November 5, 2001, through the comments section of our post yesterday, Privacy Invasion: Who's To Blame?

In a sense, the only people truly prepared to spring into action after the terrorist attacks on September 11 were the civil-liberties groups. "I knew there was going to be a problem, that we were going to see an effort to restrict civil liberties," recalls Morton Halperin, a State Department veteran and former national-security analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. The day after the attack, Halperin began e-mailing his colleagues...

While Halperin and the ACLU were rounding up the usual suspects on the left, [Grover] Norquist was working his connections on the right. By the end of September, Organizations in Defense of Freedom included not just the left-leaning Alliance for Justice, Americans for Democratic Action, and Human Rights Watch, but also such conservative groups as Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, and the American Conservative Union...

Increasingly, the civil-liberties community began to turn to conservative Republicans for traction against the Clinton administration as well as Democratic and Republican centrists. "I think it was principled and it was politics," says one civil-liberties lawyer. "The principle was opposition to government power, and the politics was opposition to Bill Clinton...."

Of course, that's not necessarily good. . . Some conservative organizations, such as the NRA, have unique interpretations of certain civil liberties. Other groups have only selective enthusiasm for them. But then, so did the Clinton administration.