These are traitorous (NY)Times

Dan Froomkin has a good column at the WaPo on the topic of those traitors at the NY Times that Glenn wrote about yesterday. Froomkin asks:

It's a monstrous charge for the White House to suggest that the press is essentially aiding and abetting the enemy. But where's the evidence?

[...]

But not once has the White House definitively answered this question: How are any of these disclosures actually impairing the pursuit of terrorists?

Terrorists already knew the government was trying to track them down through their finances, their phone calls and their e-mails. Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, Bush publicly declared open season on terrorist financing.

As far as I can tell, all these disclosures do is alert the American public to the fact that all this stuff is going on without the requisite oversight, checks and balances.

How does it possibly matter to a terrorist whether the government got a court order or not? Or whether Congress was able to exercise any oversight? The White House won't say. In fact, it can't say.

By contrast, it does matter to us.

[...]

The potentially damaging political problem here is that the evidence continues to grow that the Bush White House's exercise of unchecked authority in the war on terror poses a serious threat to American civil liberties and privacy rights. It wasn't that long ago, after all, that an American president used the mechanisms of national security to spy on his political enemies.

The sum total of the administration's defense against this charge appears to be: Trust us. Trust that we're only spying on terrorists, and not anyone else.

But what if the trust isn't there? And what if they're breaking the law

I'll give the last word to Glenn:

That is why not a single person who ever sermonizes righteously about the traitors at the Times can ever identify what ought to be the first fact that is identified when accusing someone of harming national security -- namely, the disclosure of facts which (a) would enable the terrorists to avoid surveillance detection and (b) was not previously known. Those facts simply do not exist, which is why nobody ever identifies them.

[...]

Yet again, The Boston Globe demonstrates what real journalism is supposed to do -- subject claims by the Government and its loyalists (in this case, claims that the Times disclosed information that will help the terrorists commit terrorist attacks) to skeptical scrutiny, and then report facts which have been concealed that undermine the Government's claim. That's the definition of the core journalistic purpose.

This is not a complicated matter. Nobody who is making these accusations can identify a single specific act that Terrorists would have engaged in before that they will now avoid. That, by itself, does not merely undermine, but destroys, the claim that the Times harmed national security. Any "journalist" who allows those accusations to be made without pointing out that fact are, to put it mildly, acting quite irresponsibly.