A top intelligence official <a href=”decided not to tell the press about a top secret intelligence-gathering program? How totally unbelievable:

When he was asked about the National Security Agency’s controversial domestic surveillance program last Monday, U.S. intelligence chief John D. Negroponte objected to the question and said the government was “absolutely not” monitoring domestic calls without warrants. “I wouldn’t call it domestic spying,” he told reporters. “This is about international terrorism and telephone calls between people thought to be working for international terrorism and people here in the United States.” Three days later, USA Today divulged details of the NSA’s effort to log a majority of the telephone calls made within the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — amassing the domestic call records of tens of millions of U.S. households and businesses in an attempt to sift them for clues about terrorist threats.

The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen uses the same faulty reasoning that the New York Times editorial board used on Friday. Negroponte said that the NSA terrorist surveillance program doesn’t involve listening in on purely domestic calls. USA Today reported that the NSA data mining program does not involve monitoring the content of any domestic communications.

This article contains zero news. It actually detracts from the public’s understanding of the program, insofar as it confuses the details of two separate programs in an attempt to make John Negroponte look like a liar. And it wins the Ron Burgandy award* for stating the obvious with lines like this:

In doing so, the administration rarely offered any hint that a much broader operation, involving millions of domestic calls, was underway.

Keeping classified programs a secret might be a novel concept to the Washington Post, but for top government officials it’s part of the job description.

* “It’s so damn hot. Milk was a bad choice.”