Moreover, SWIFT's cooperation in international efforts to monitor terrorists' banking activities was a matter of public knowledge long before the Times detailed the Treasury Department program. As former Bush administration counterterrorism official Roger Cressey noted in the June 28 Globe article, "There have been public references to SWIFT before. ... It has been in the public domain before." Indeed, in his June 28 column, washingtonpost.com columnist Dan Froomkin noted that according to SWIFT's website, the consortium has a "history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities." And as former State Department official Victor Comras noted in a June 23 Counterterrorism Blog post, the United Nations Al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group learned of the SWIFT program years ago -- a fact the group incorporated into its December 2002 report to the U.N. Security Council:

The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.

And long before June 23, Bush and other administration officials acknowledged that terrorists were increasingly using other methods of transferring money to evade detection. As Media Matters wrote:

In testimony before Congress in 2004, Treasury Department undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence Stuart A. Levey said, "As the formal and informal financial sectors become increasingly inhospitable to financiers of terrorism, we have witnessed an increasing reliance by Al Qaida and terrorist groups on cash couriers. The movement of money via cash couriers is now one of the principal methods that terrorists use to move funds." In 2002 and 2003, the Congressional Research Service documented terrorists' increased use of alternative money flows, including "informal value transfer [hawala] systems that leave virtually no paper trail." Further, various news outlets and independent organizations have noted terrorist organizations' hesitance to use the international banking system in recent years.

Yet White House press secretary Tony Snow said during his June 27 press briefing, "I am absolutely sure they [the terrorists] didn't know about SWIFT."

If this sounds familiar, it should. When the NSA domestic spying scandal broke, the administration and its defenders argued -- just as absurdly -- that Al Qaeda terrorists now knew we were trying to listen in on their phone calls. But of course, they had known that for years. What that story revealed was not that the government was monitoring phone calls, but that it was doing so in violation of the law and without the proper warrants. When he was confronted with the obvious fact that Al Qaeda terrorists were quite well aware they were being monitored during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales replied, "If they're not reminded about it all the time, in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget."

Nonetheless, as we detailed, this week conservatives trooped to television studios to propose that the Times be prosecuted for treason:

• Melanie Morgan, radio talk show host: "I see it as treason, plain and simple, and my advice to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at this point in time is chop-chop, hurry up, let's get these prosecutors fired up and get the subpoenas served, get the indictments going, and get these guys [Keller and The New York Times] behind jail." [MSNBC's Hardball, 6/26 /06]
• Ann Coulter, right-wing pundit: [R]evealing a classified program, which no one thinks violates any laws ... that has led to the capture of various terrorists, and to various terrorist money-laundering operations. If that is not treason, then we're not prosecuting anymore." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 6/26/06]
• William Kristol, editor, The Weekly Standard: "I think the Justice Department has an obligation to consider prosecution. ... This isn't a partisan thing of the Bush administration. This is a U.S. government secret program in a time of war, willfully exposed for no good reason by The New York Times." [Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, 6/25/06]

Many other conservative media figures took to the airwaves to claim that The New York Times was aiming to help Al Qaeda:

• L. Brent Bozell III, president, Media Research Center: "The New York Times needs to be reminded ... that on September 11, 2001, something really awful happened right down the street from the newspaper. ... And the last thing we need is The New York Times aiding and abetting the terrorist movement. And that's exactly what they're doing by divulging these secrets." [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 6/27/06]
• Rush Limbaugh, syndicated radio host: "If you look at The New York Times and the kind of stories they're leaking and running and the information they're getting, it's clear that they're trying to help the terrorists. They're trying to help the jihadists." Limbaugh added that he thought that "80 percent of their subscribers have to be jihadists." According to the latest circulation statistics, the Times sells more than 690,000 copies of its daily edition, and has more than 1.1 million subscribers to its Sunday edition, via home delivery. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 6/27/06]
• Andrew C. McCarthy, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies: "Yet again, The New York Times was presented with a simple choice: help protect American national security or help al Qaeda. Yet again, it sided with al Qaeda." ["The Media's War Against the War Continues," National Review Online, 6/23/06]
• Newt Gingrich, former House speaker (R-GA) and Fox News political analyst: "You would think that The New York Times, located on the same island where the World Trade Center once existed, would have some residual memory of 9-11. You'd think that The New York Times ... would have some sense of survival. ... [M]y sense is that they hate George W. Bush so much that they would be prepared to cripple America in order to go after the president." [Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, 6/26/06]
• Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report senior writer: "Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? ... We have a press that is at war with an administration, while our country is at war against merciless enemies. The Times is acting like an adolescent kicking the shins of its parents, hoping to make them hurt while confident of remaining safe under their roof. But how safe will we remain when our protection depends on the Times?" ["Why do "they" hate us?" syndicated column, 6/26/06]
• Morton M. Kondracke, Roll Call executive editor: "And for God's sake, The New York Times ought to look down the street and remember where 9-11 happened. It really happened in New York City, you know? And they act as though it never happened." [Fox News' The Beltway Boys, 6/24/06]
• Heather Mac Donald, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal: "By now it's undeniable: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives." ["National Security Be Damned," The Weekly Standard, July 3 issue]

So have news organizations stood up for their colleagues at the Times? Unfortunately, the response from most of the country's editorial boards has been muted at best. A Media Matters review of the 50 papers contained in the Lexis-Nexis "major newspapers" database found that fewer than half editorialized in the Times' defense. (For the honor roll, click here.) The Wall Street Journal's editorial page criticized the Times yet somehow managed to exonerate its own reporting on the subject.

And what of the rest of the news media? Have they been beaten down so badly by years of conservative haranguing that they can't even stand up in support of independent journalism when members of Congress are calling for their colleagues to be prosecuted for doing their jobs, when right-wing talk show hosts are saying things like, "I would have no problem with [Keller] being sent to the gas chamber"? Have they not an ounce of courage left?

"Thank you, sir, may I have another?"

One question many people are asking is, why now? Why is this coordinated assault on the media happening now, especially when the idea that the newspapers actually endangered national security falls apart on even a moment's examination?

One answer is that the deeper Republicans sink politically, the more eager they are to change the subject, particularly to something that will rile up their base. The fact that all the right wing's anger is focused on one of its favorite whipping boys, The New York Times -- when the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal also ran stories on the banking program -- suggests that the attack was planned for maximum political effect.

And consider what happened on Capitol Hill just before this story broke: The big story of the week was Iraq, the albatross around the administration's neck. Republicans had gleefully brought up for debate two Democratic proposals on the war, sure that they could successfully paint the opposition as weak, cowardly advocates of "cut and run," yet things weren't turning out quite as they had hoped.

And at first, the media were happy to help. As we discussed last week, despite the fact that Republicans were unified in their support for the indefinite continuation of an unpopular war, the dominant theme of coverage was that Democrats were "on the defensive."

Then something interesting happened: On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Gen. George Casey, the commander of American forces in Iraq, had presented to President Bush a plan to begin withdrawing U.S. troops. Democrats were quick to point out that Casey seemed to agree with them (although CBS News' Joie Chen asserted that Casey's plan was "not a cut-and-run strategy").

The Los Angeles Times, fervently looking for the cloud behind any Democratic silver lining, came up with this bit of insightful analysis:

Last week, Congress debated two Democratic proposals that called for Bush to begin a troop drawdown, resolutions that divided the party. Public acknowledgment of the Casey plan by administration officials could leave the Democratic Party's leaders in an even more awkward position, having backed a withdrawal plan already embraced by the White House -- in effect leaving the party with no Iraq policy distinct from the administration's as the parties head into the midterm elections.

As Greg Sargent wrote on his weblog The Horse's Mouth, "Just try to wrap your brain around that logic for a second." Yes, it must be just like the time Bush abandoned his bid to privatize Social Security, leaving Democrats flummoxed and politically weaker because they were unable to accuse him of trying to privatize Social Security.

But here's what ABC's The Note asked:

The Note is confused: If General Casey (and President Bush) are going to do what the Democrats want anyway in terms of troop withdrawals (as Democrats are now claiming), how can they justify all this yelling about Bush not listening to the American people? Do they care more about the name calling or the policy?

Yes, you read that correctly: ABC News thinks it was Democrats who were doing too much "name calling" when it came to Iraq. But just remember: The Note is the expression of conventional wisdom among the Washington press corps. In their world, Republicans are tough, smart, and cool, and Democrats are weak, dumb, and nerdy; Republican hypocrisy just reveals the hypocrisy of Democrats; bad poll numbers for Bush only indicate a coming turnaround, and on and on. As Lapdogs author Eric Boehlert wisely noted, "The Note's definition of buzz has been whatever Beltway Republicans are chattering about. The Note has been nourished on an era of total Republican rule. It shows."

And it was hardly just The Note. As we documented, the media's discussion of Iraq of late has been steeped in GOP talking points, including the following: