Why didn't they just check the comment section?

I thought our experience in New Orleans would have demonstrated that when federal prosecutors want to track down a leak, they don't have to go through all this rigamarole. Eventually it all just comes out in the local Newhouse online publication. Fred Heebe can put them in touch with a decent forensic linguist if they don't already have one.

Meanwhile go read Greenwald who makes two excellent points. One is that the Grown Up press is awfully late to the game acknowledging that the Obama Adminstration has surpassed and lapped Bush/Cheney several times over in abuses of basic civil liberties.

For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

The other, is that you can never overestimate the capacity of establishment so-called "liberals" for craven hypocrisy in these matters. 

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues.