The press is free to print “Bush is a horrible human being and should be beheaded in the name of Chthulu” all day long if it wants. What it is not free to do is to subborn, or conspire with, government officials to reveal classified information. Get it? My car dealer is not free to decide that he should not report my $10,000 cash down payment “because the CTR law is wrong”. If he does not do it, he is guilty of illegality — money laundering and possibly tax evasion. If I conspire with him, I am likewise guilty. How far do you want to take freedom of the press? If the editors of NYT had shot Jayson Blair could they have used freedom of the press as a defense? After all, through his lies and plagiarism, he had been acting against the public interest for a long time.

Yes the Bali terrorists were caught under this program – this was reported in the original articles. Try to keep up.

Who told us that?

It worked how? In that they say it worked? They say everything works (see, e.g., their torture policies, finding WMDs, catching bin laden, “mission accomplished”) until it comes to light, through the media, that it doesn’t. There is no way in hell I’m letting the Bush administration tell me which of their policies work.

I am grateful that organizations like the NYT exist to bring such polices to light — even if doing so does cause conservative bloggers to have silly coniption fits for a couple days every time they do so.

So the right has now added freedom of the press to the list of constitutional freedoms they’ll gladly give up to be “protected” from terrorists. In that, this is very much like my daily prostate example. You’re bending over and enjoying it.

That’s the most maddening part about all of these secret tactics — we never know if they work or not.

Bullshit. We do know that this particular program caught the mastermind of the Bali attacks, which killed more innocent people than Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City. You might just as well claim we don’t really know if police tactics worked on McVeigh.

It’s like getting daily prostate exams, and the doctor is telling you “you’ll just have to trust me; you need these, or you’re gonna get cancer.”

Indeed it is just like that, except in the sense that it’s nothing like that, since we do know that this particular program worked, and prostate cancer can’t read the New York Times to learn how to escape your doctor’s diagnosis. This has got to be the dumbest analogy I’ve read in years – and that’s saying a lot.

The Bush administration has been obsessed with secrecy in this war. This is extremely suspicious. It’s the terrorists who should be secretive, not America. The terrorists the ones who should be hiding in the shadows, ashamed of their plots to kill innocents. We should be discovering secret terrorist plots, not secret American programs to invade privacy and take away rights.

What’s the value of keeping this transaction-monitoring a secret? Is it really that high in the war on terror? If the Bush administration has its way, we’ll never know.

That’s the most maddening part about all of these secret tactics — we never know if they work or not. It’s like getting daily prostate exams, and the doctor is telling you “you’ll just have to trust me; you need these, or you’re gonna get cancer.” And you wonder — does this violation of my privacy really help, or is he just doing it for his own benefit?

Did it escape your attention that we are at war? This is an effective program which let to the arrests of the Bali bombers (you probably don’t remember them with that short term memory problem you have). It only affects international transactions, and financial information is not protected btw.

There is zero evidence of abuse and significant evidence that the NYT is engaging in treason.

Hope the next terrorist event funded by money we cannot trace is in YOUR neighborhood Phil.