Anonymous Liberal wrote a thorough post reviewing Gonzles' testimony on the matter and it is worth going through what he gathered with this new information in mind:

Here's the key passage that many have quoted from Gonzales' February 6, 2006 testimony:

SCHUMER: It's been reported by multiple news outlets that the former number two man in the Justice Department, the premier terrorism prosecutor, Jim Comey, expressed grave reservations about the NSA program and at least once refused to give it his blessing. Is that true?

GONZALES: Senator, here's the response that I feel that I can give with respect to recent speculation or stories about disagreements. There has not been any serious disagreement -- and I think this is accurate -- there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations which I cannot get into. I will also say...

SCHUMER: But there was some -- I'm sorry to cut you off -- but there was some dissent within the administration. And Jim Comey did express, at some point -- that's all I asked you -- some reservations.

GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we're talking about today. They dealt with operational capabilities that we're not talking about today.

SCHUMER: I want to ask you, again, about -- we have limited time.

GONZALES: Yes, sir.

SCHUMER: It's also been reported that the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, respected lawyer and professor at Harvard Law School, expressed reservations about the program. Is that true?

GONZALES: Senator, rather than going individual by individual, let me just say that I think the differing views that have been the subject of some of these stories did not deal with the program that I'm here testifying about today.

SCHUMER: But you were telling us that none of these people expressed any reservations about the ultimate program, is that right?

GONZALES: Senator, I want to be very careful here, because, of course, I'm here only testifying about what the president has confirmed. And with respect to what the president has confirmed, I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you're identifying had concerns about this program.

This testimony, imo, fits into the narrative the NYTimes story is tryong to weave. The problem is the President confirmed the existence of a program that existed PRIOR to the infamous Comey/Goldsmith/Meuller revolt:

At another point in the testimony Gonzales said:

GONZALES: Of course, there were debates, Senator. If I may just finish this thought, think about the issues that are implicated here: a very complicated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- it's extremely complicated -- the president's inherent authority under the Constitution as commander in chief, the Fourth Amendment, the interpretation of the authorization to use military force. You've got a program that's existed over four years. You have multiple lawyers looking at the legal analysis. Of course, there's -- I mean, this is what lawyers do. We disagree, we debate, we argue.

Here again, Gonzales concedes that "the program" has existed for over four years. So he can't now claim that he was only referring to the program that existed from mid-2004 onward.

AL then hits on the clinching problems for Gonzales:

And here's the final nail in the coffin. Gonzales testified that "there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed." He has repeatedly used this construction to hedge his statements.

Fine then, let's look at what the President actually confirmed. President Bush first revealed the existence of the NSA program in his weekly radio address on December 17, 2005. Here's what he said:

In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. . . .

The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland. During each assessment, previous activities under the authorization are reviewed. The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the Attorney General and the Counsel to the President. I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks, and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related groups.

Obviously this predates the adjusted program, as AL notes but it does more in my mind -- it in no way excludes data mining.

The President neither described nor confirmed any particular method of eavesdropping.

In a different post, Orin Kerr discussed data mining as a possible program described by the President:

That seems somewhat odd to me, because, as I've explained before, my primary legal concerns are statutory, not constitutional. This raises a couple of different possibilities. For example, it may be that the program doesn't violate FISA after all, and the debate within government has really been about the Fourth Amendment. The concern within some government officials may be that scanning traffic en masse for phone numbers or e-mail addresses of even foreign calls may violate the Fourth Amendment rights of domestic people whose communications are scanned (even only in the passing way that any Internet wiretap must scan all traffic). That is consistent with Risen's claim that "Now that [foreign to] foreign calls were being routed through switches that were physically on American soil, eavesdropping on those calls might be a violation of the regulations and laws restricting the NSA from spying inside the United States." The "regulations and laws" don't seem to be FISA, as I believe FISA is implicated only when the person monitored is in the United States; could those "laws" be the Fourth Amendment? Are there other "regulations" that govern the NSA that might be implicated here? It's hard to tell. Of course, it's also possible that the Fourth Amendment concerns are a bit of a red herring: the claim may be a cover for other motives. Who knows.

It is very clear that Orin Kerr considered data mining as one of many potential aspects of the program "confirmed by the President." Indeed, it seems clear to me that the President was intentionally very non-specific about what he was describing. How could Gonzales have been so sure what the President was describing was NOT data mining? As AL notes, Gonzales' own testimony describes the program that existed prior to the exclusion of data mining.

The Times simply gets it wrong when it writes:

In response to the [NYTimes] articles, Mr. Bush confirmed the eavesdropping, saying it was limited to communications in and out of the United States involving people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. He did not, however, confirm the data mining, nor has any other official done so publicly.

Let's repeat what the President said:

In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. . . .

The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland. During each assessment, previous activities under the authorization are reviewed. The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the Attorney General and the Counsel to the President. I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks, and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related groups.

(Emphasis supplied.) Intercepts do NOT exclude data mining. Nor did the "reports" that President Buish EXPRESSLY mentions exclude data mining. On the contrary, those report expressly feature data mining issues as the Times itself describes in this article:

In December 2005, The Times published articles describing the program, the data mining and the internal legal debate. The newspaper reported that the N.S.A. had combed large volumes of telephone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. . . . The uproar grew when USA Today reported in May 2006 more details of the N.S.A.’s acquisition from telephone companies of the phone call databases. In response to the articles, Mr. Bush confirmed the eavesdropping, saying it was limited to communications in and out of the United States involving people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

The President SPECIFICALLY referenced the news reporting and the programs described therein. It is thus untenable for the NYTimes to now state:

He did not, however, confirm the data mining, nor has any other official done so publicly.

He in fact DID confirm that he was talking about the program described in the newspaper reports, that DID in fact report a data mining program.

Thus when:

Mr. Gonzales defended the surveillance in an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2006, saying there had been no internal dispute about its legality. He told the senators: “There has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”

He did not tell the truth. The President was referring to newspaper reports that described data mining; he confirmed those reports. This is bad work by the NYTimes, yet again.