The New York Times/CIA Collaboration...

...exposed and detailed by Glenn Greenwald:

The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.

But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA's role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama's re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd's column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: "Any word??", suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd's impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.

Mazzetti obligingly sent a copy of the column to the CIA, pre-publication, along with a caution: "this didn't come from me … and please delete after you read."

And The reaction from Times management?

"New York Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet called POLITICO to explain the situation, but provided little clarity, saying he could not go into detail on the issue because it was an intelligence matter.

"'I know the circumstances, and if you knew everything that's going on, you'd know it's much ado about nothing,' Baquet said. 'I can't go into in detail. But I'm confident after talking to Mark that it's much ado about nothing.'

"'The optics aren't what they look like,' he went on. 'I've talked to Mark, I know the circumstance, and given what I know, it's much ado about nothing.'"

See the sales technique employed there? It's a law of advertising that, when you want something embedded in an individual's memory, you repeat the pertinent information three times; thus, car advertisers (among others) announce the dealership's phone number three times in a 30-second commercial. Here, repeated three times, are the words: much ado about nothing.

Suuure. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Of course it's no secret that The New York Times collaborates with the Obama administration, but I thought I'd mention it because a friend an acquaintance of mine likes to cite the Times as a trustworthy news source. Well, it is - - for sports scores. Raw facts. "Truth" is quite another matter.

h/t The Drudge Report

Update: Bad link before, fixed now. Thanks to NotClauswitz for pointing it out.