On the New York Times

For those of you interested in a more sane review of the current conflict over the New York Times stories, check out this post from Glenn Greenwald. He's not a Blog-O-Fascist, but he's pretty sharp. I particularly enjoyed this bit.

We've endured six months now of increasingly shrill and vicious assaults on the nation's media, whereby any journalist who publishes information which George Bush wants to conceal is branded a traitor and a criminal deserving of imprisonment, if not worse. And all of it is based upon a plainly false factual premise -- that these stories are disclosing information which can help the terrorists evade surveillance because they are disclosing critical operational details of our surveillance programs. Which information specifically has been disclosed that: (a) was not previously disclosed and (b) can help terrorists evade detection? There is none.

Thus, all anyone has to do to realize the sheer falsity of those claims is to compare the "treasonous" articles in question to prior public statements and documents from the Bush administration. Terrorists already knew that we were attempting to eavesdrop on their telephone calls because the Bush administration repeatedly talked about our surveillance programs. And, for the same reason, terrorists already knew that we were monitoring banking transactions -- including specifically those effectuated through SWIFT. And yet we are subjected to an increasingly frenzied lynch mob insisting that reporters have committed treason without their ever really being challenged by the media itself over these factually false claims.

Makes sense to me.