The New York Times, meanwhile, let the world know that the U.S. has authorized Special Operations units to “launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.”  Pakistan is one of the most important, volatile, politically unstable Muslim countries in the world, and much of the population would erupt in rage if they found out American troops were operating on Pakistani soil.  Are the Timesmen trying to make it impossible for the U.S. to go after its archenemy?  Or are they just warning Osama bin Laden that he needs to find a new cave in a different neighborhood?

The Times has printed a lengthy list of stories that have served only to complicate or cripple U.S. efforts to defeat the terrorists.  Among the lowlights: the obsession with stories about U.S. casualties; the massive overstatement of the events at Abu Ghraib; the obscene misreporting of the “massacre” that wasn’t at Haditha; the exposure of U.S. efforts to track international banking transactions by terrorists, and  worst of all, the exposure of U.S. spying on terrorist communications. 

Vice President Dick Cheney commented on the latter item at the National Press Club on June 2, with entirely too much grace:

The New York Times won the Pulitzer for revealing the fact of the terrorist surveillance program.  Now, with all due respect to being here in the National Press Club with a lot of my friends in the press, I thought the idea that The New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize -- one of the highest awards in journalism -- for revealing one of the nation’s most important secrets and telling the enemy how it was we were intercepting their communications, frankly, was less than honorable.  It bothered me greatly.

Less than honorable?  How about downright unpatriotic, if not treasonous? Amazingly, The New York Times won a Pulitzer for crippling the nation’s war effort.  Apparently The New Yorker, the Times, and even the Pulitzer committee are shot through with expatriots