The New York Times is absolutely shameless. (Hat tip: Bill.)

On the front page of today’s NEW YORK TIMES, national security reporter James Risen claims that “months after the September 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States... without the court approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.”

Risen claims the White House asked the paper not to publish the article, saying that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny.

Risen claims the TIMES delayed publication of the article for a year to conduct additional reporting.

But now comes word James Risen’s article is only one of many “explosive newsbreaking” stories that can be found — in his upcoming book!

The paper failed to reveal the urgent story was tied to a book release and sale.

UPDATE at 12/16/05 3:01:31 pm:

Matthew Good writes:

Little Green Footballs claimed that the Times placed the sale of their paper ahead of US National Security, accusing it of being unpatriotic.

Of course, I didn’t write those words; in this case I don’t think the issue of patriotism ever concerned anyone at the New York Times.

Good continues:

This bizarre notion that a government is above reproach once it takes power is a massively dangerous, apathetic, and irresponsible assumption. No democratically elected government has the right to operate beyond the public’s knowledge, no matter how severe the security risk. For to abuse the very basis of liberty is to damage that which claims freedom its greatest virtue.

And again, I didn’t write that our government is above reproach. But another very important freedom is the freedom that citizens have to criticize the media, when they feel the media are acting in a venal self-interested way, against the best interests of our country.

Because the New York Times is certainly not above reproach, either.

Good continues:

Abraham Lincoln once claimed that ‘as a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’ And even he, who suspended the right of habeas corpus during his own presidency, may very well have agreed that the United States now finds itself sitting in a room with a handful of pills and a bottle of vodka, momentarily distracted by its own reflection in the mirror.

And I think this reveals much more about Matthew Good than it does about Abraham Lincoln, for whom I would never presume to speak.