The Big Brother America

The ABC News blog The Blotter reports the federal government is monitoring who ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post are calling.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

"In-person" means that the source can not use the phone and must set up a face-to-face meeting. The NSA Data-mining is used to protect the Bush administration from who they preceive as enemies in their paranoid worldview. Frank Rich explained it perfectly.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

These people would literally shoot the messangers if they could legally get away with it. We already know that they don't have a problem with using CIA black sites to torturing people. The Pentagon gave the laughable excuse that they didn't want the photos released because they might embarrass the prisoners. Did the Pentagon believe naked pyramids were a recreational activity? I'm amazed these people are able to look themselves in the mirror after mouthing this spin.

Hat tip to Bitch|Lab