This is the best piece I've read on the rightwing attack against the NYT. It's long but well worth the entire read.
(snip)
If it were the case that the Bush administration were abusing its surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers -- by, for instance, spying on innocent Americans or gathering data on the private lives of its political opponents -- how would we possibly know? How would it ever become something other than a "theoretical" concern? It couldn't be.
The whole point -- the one which The New York Times is attempting finally to examine -- is that we have previously decided as a nation that we want our Government to engage in aggressive intelligence-gathering activities against our enemies, but we trust the Government to do so only with active and vigilant oversight from other branches to ensure that there is no abuse, and do not trust these powers to be exercised in secret. That was the whole point, for instance, of FISA -- passed 95-1 by the Senate 28 years ago. We want the Government to engage in aggressive eavesdropping, but only trust it to do so with judicial oversight, precisely because allowing the Government to do so in secret means that we will never discover abuse of those powers.
To assert that we need not worry about anything because there is "no evidence of abuse" -- that we should keep our heads down and go about our business -- is plainly, even painfully, illogical. The reason we don't want the Government to be able to act without oversight is precisely because they can then abuse its powers without being detected, i.e., without there being any "evidence of abuse." If the Bush administration exercises these powers with no governmental oversight -- as it does -- how does Michael Barone think there would be any evidence of abuse if, in fact, the administration was abusing its power?
Administrations of both parties systematically abused its eavesdropping powers for 40 years without detection precisely because it operated in secrecy. The reason why it is dangerous to allow the Government to act in secrecy -- to troll at will through our financial transactions and listen in on our telephone conversations -- is precisely because there is no way to learn of abuses. To assert, as Barone has, that abuse is "only theoretical" is to illustrate why oversight is needed, not to demonstrate that it is unnecessary.
The defining ethos of our country is a distrust of government power -- or at least it always used to be. The entirety of the Constitution is devoted to imposing safeguards against government abuses because our country was founded upon the principle that we do not place blind faith in political officials to act properly. But the argument being peddled now is that we can place blind trust in the Bush administration and we need not worry ourselves about anything. At the very least, such a dramatic reversal of how we think about our government ought to be the subject of debate. That is the "public interest" to which Bill Keller is referring when explaining why the Times ran this story. And that is precisely what the media is supposed to do.
Much more...
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/06/bush-lynch-mob-against-nations-free.html
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