Missing the Point

I have been reading everywhere about the "treason" purportedly as a result of the NYT reporting on the SWIFT banking information. The Boston Globe, actually doing some reporting, shows that everything supposedly revealed in the Times article was already in the public domain and much of it placed there repeatedly by the Bush administration itself.

I think this whole deal is just Rove and company moving into the next phase of damage control over the disastrous Iraq debacle. They know they have lost it and that more and more of the country knows that have screwed this up so badly that there is slim to no chance of making it right. The next step is to start passing the buck and finding someone, anyone to blame. The meme that is under development by the Bush boys and girls with the aid of the Hasterts, O'Rielly's, etc. is to blame the Times and the press for their failure. It goes like this...

"We coulda' won the war if every time we turned around we weren't hampered by the press revealing all of our secret tools. All of out most effective weapons were made useless by the press. You can't win a war without weapons and all of ours were taken away from us. If you are looking for someone to blame for the mess then blame the press."

These folks know that there was no operational disclosures in the Times article and no one has pointed out any damage to out capability because of it. They can't because there is not any. The only logical reason for this hoopla is to try and begin shifting the blame.

As Glenn Greenwald asks...

What, specifically, would a terrorist have been willing to do on June 22 [the day before the banking story was published] that he would not do on June 23 as a result of the Times' article?

What the Times revealed is the lack of oversight and checks on these intelligence-gathering activities, not the existence of the activities themselves, which were already well known.