Failure of Perspective at Wash Post

Cori Dauber at Ranting Profs has a good post explaining how unfair the Post is in a story on federal prosecutions of illegal immigrants:

The Post writes about the use of immigration violations to get at people suspected of terrorism links when other routes are unavailable or are too difficult, but such a story is almost by definition going to be skewed. It's almost impossible to find government representatives who will discuss either specific cases or approaches freely, while it's easy to find sympathetic, hardworking immigrants who claim they've been unfairly caught up in a dragnet. (Well, that and the fact that I've yet to see an article in the Post or the Times in which the immigrants weren't worthy, hardworking, model citizens.)

She gets in a little dig at the Post:

when it comes to practical value, this struck me as missing the forest for the trees:

"Authorities are often reluctant to disclose why an immigrant's name emerged in a national security investigation, because the information is classified or is part of a continuing probe. Homeland Security officials turned down a request by The Washington Post for the names of all those charged in the past two years, making it difficult to assess how effective their strategy has been at thwarting terrorism."

Yeah, not so difficult really, and here's a little tip on that: we haven't been attacked at home since 9/11. Remember right after the attacks most people thought more attacks were virtually inevitable. So whatever they're doing seems to be working pretty well, yes?