The Higazy story is winding down. As fully described here, a few weeks ago the Federal Court of Appeals in Manhattan posted a decision on its website involving an Egyptian national, Higazy, who was coerced into confessing to his involvement in the September 11 hijackings. Higazy was later exonerated when an airline pilot claimed ownership of a two-way radio which authorities thought belonged to Higazy.

The Court of Appeals said that Higazy could sue the FBI agent for coercing his confession in violation of the Constitution. The FBI threatened Higazy's family in Egypt. As we don't hear much about these tactics within our borders, that was news in and of itself. It was also newsworthy because coerced confessions are against the law and the case arose in the context of September 11. But what made the case even more interesting was two things: after only a few hours (when I had already blogged about the case), the Court pulled the case from its website and reposted it the next day without the good stuff: Higazy's testimony about how the FBI threatened his family. Even newsier, in my view, was the Court of Appeals' request that another legal blogger remove the original decision from his website since it contained classified information. That blogger, How Appealing, declined to remove the decision. In hindsight, it looks to many of us that the redacted information was just too embarassing to the FBI.

This story really had it all. Coerced confessions, September 11, a premature court opinion, redacted allegations about improper government coercion and what had to be the court's unprecedented request to remove something from a legal blog. But for some reason, while this story spread across the political and legal blogosphere (with some great commentary, by the way), the traditional media largely ignored it, except for the Washington Post and my local paper, which had the news judgment to know that a national story always has a local angle. Columbia Journalism Review was also curious about the media silence.

We have become officially immune to stories about American complicity in coercion and torture, at home and abroad. The "new normal" occasioned by September 11 means that anything goes. Torture, coercion, lies. No one gets in trouble for advocating "tougher" interrogation techniques. It's a political liability to suggest otherwise. The Republican presidential candidates are unwilling to rule out torture, like waterboarding and other techniques that cannot possibly produce reliable information about threats to American national security. The Democrats are slowly but surely giving Bush what he wants in the way of warrantless wiretaps, terrified of looking "weak on terror." The steady stream of news confirming the ugliness of the Iraq war and related behavior (much of it chronicled here) are become too much for us to bear. This is no longer a case of the American people not knowing any better. We now know what's out there, but we don't want to know.

That makes the blogosphere so much more important. Bloggers are like the reporters that I worked with in college, when we interned for a newspaper in Albany covering every meeting in the Capitol, from mundane budget committee hearings to the governor's press conferences. From time to time, college students would stumble upon a story that everyone overlooked simply by virtue of their presence at a meeting or legislative debate that no one else bothered to attend. Bloggers who pay attention to every detail will find something that no one else caught. But if the traditional media ignores it, then 95 percent of the population will never know it happened. And then it's like it didn't happen at all.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, when 60 Minutes was caught using a questionable document to prove its charge that Bush had wiggled out his National Guard responsibilities, a conservative blogger figured out that the typeface on the memo did not exist in the early 1970's. A blogger broke the story which made CBS look bad and emboldened Bush supporters to vote. In contrast, a few weeks ago, when bloggers like myself and others broke the story of the unprecedented redaction of embarassing FBI shenanigans from a court ruling, the media snoozed through it. While 60 Minutes was stretching the truth to prove something which most of us already knew to be true (that Bush finagled his way out of military service), the Higazy/court story exposed by the bloggers told us something we did not know: that even the courts are bending over backwards to accommodate the government in the post-9/11 world, even on questions that do not appear to threaten security. Read Higazy's testimony here and tell me how this places our security at risk.

Here is what we did learn when the Higazy story was circulating around the Internet: Rudy Giuliani betrayed his New York roots in pulling for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. New Yorkers hate the Red Sox for reasons that are too complicated (or trivial) to discuss here. The New York City tabloids ran simultaneous photo-shopped front pages on this vital issue, calling Rudy a traitor. Even the New York Times piled on Rudy. Yeah, that was important.