You have to hand it to Powerline’s John Hindrocket, for combining so many lies, hypocrisy, and tortured logic into such a compact sentence.

Here he was on CNN’s Reliable Sources this past weekend:

KURTZ:

OK. Let’s move — let’s move beyond the legal justification. You think the public doesn’t have a right to know because classified information is involved that the

CIA is maintaining secret presence in Eastern Europe, that the Bush administration is conducting wiretaps in this country without — without warrants? You would be just as happy if reporters could not publish that kind of information?

HINDERAKER: Oh, absolutely. There’s all kinds of information that you can’t give to the American public without also giving it to the terrorists. That’s what “The New York Times” did, and as a result our security has been compromised.

The NSA program was capturing lots of international terrorist communications. That’s dropped off drastically since “The New York Times” published the story. So they’ve — they’ve damaged our security.

(1)  First of all, how does a blogging pundit know that we’ve been capturing "drastically" fewer terrorist communications since the publication ot the New York Time article?  Is somebody with inside knowledge telling him this, and if so, isn’t that the same kind of leak to the public that Hindrocket condemns?

UPDATE:  It’s pretty clear that Hindrocket is just making shit up.  His conservative blogging allies are all abuzz about how al Qaeda chatter is at "pre-9/11 levels".

(2)  Secondly (although relatedly), if the New York Times aided and comforted al Qaeda by publishing the story about the NSA wiretaps, doesn’t Hindrocket do the same thing by letting al Qaeda know that that the NSA is scoring a big bunch of failures?

(3)  Finally, assuming that what Hindrocket says is true (that the NSA started experiencing fewer communications intercepts following publication of the NYT story), he obviously doesn’t understand the difference between correlation and causation.  Wonkette explains:

We’d like to point out that there have been no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since Senator Russ Feingold introduced his resolution to censure the President. That must mean that censuring the President is the newest and most cutting-edge weapon on the war on terror in our arsenal. Emphasis on the arse.