CNN and others in MSM are now parroting the line that the SWIFT program was really not all that secret, given that the president himself had spoken publicly about efforts to track the finances of international terrorists.

It's not a very convincing case.

Speaking about general efforts to track terrorists via their finances, as the president has done, is quite a different matter from providing the terrorists a roadmap of the devices being used to track them, as the New York Times did last Friday.

Bill Keller's assertion that the New York Times did not provide the terrorists with any more information than they already had about the monitoring program, as a CNN correspondent just reported Keller said, is absurd. And the current media effort to diminish this treacherous act by the New York Times is even more absurd.