Old Gray Lady Going Down?

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times published on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary John Snow expressed his disgust with the paper: "The New York Times' decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide," Snow wrote.

"In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails." President Bush has called publication of the story "disgraceful." And some members of Congress, including Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Sen. James Bunning (R-Ky.), have accused the New York Times of outright treason -- and they're demanding a federal investigation. "That the press wouldn't have better sense than to leak critical information on terrorists so that they know what we're doing -- that scares the devil out of me," Bunning told reporters on Tuesday.