Sweetness & Light reminds us of the New York Times' shifting position on fighting terrorism by routing out its finances with an op-ed written immediately after 9/11 that concludes, "If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one".

That's 180-degrees opposite from their current worldview, but then I guess if you flip-flop enough times, you become immune to the effects of whiplash. Meanwhile, Ranting Professors explains to Howard Kurtz why the Times has earned conservatives' wrath on this issue:

People are angriest at the Times because the Times went first. They broke the story. At that point the decision was out of the hands of the other papers -- it's just that simple. In fact, as Patterico points out (indeed as the Kurtz story mentions) once the Times posted their story, there really was no decision to be made by the other papers.

Update: In a new City Journal essay, Nicole Gelinas writes:

One of the New York Times’s justifications for exposing the Bush administration’s post-9/11 scrutiny of international banking transactions via access to Swift, the Belgium-based international banking-information system, is that the American people never gave the feds permission to snoop into banking records—even those of suspected Islamist terrorists. Thus, the Times must save the day by alerting us all. But there’s a flaw in this justification. When the Bush administration did ask the American people for permission to scrutinize banking records for terrorist activity, Congress practically shouted yes, without public objection.