If a tree falls in the woods, but there are T.V. cameras there to capture it and then send the video around the world via broadcast, cable and Internet, for hundreds of millions of people to see, is it really "secretive?"

Here's today's NY Times Editorial:

A Secretive Transfer in Iraq

Two days early, with a veil of secrecy and a tight security lockdown, Washington's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer III, handed a hollow and uncertain sovereignty to Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist collaborator of Saddam Hussein who spent most of the past three decades exiled in London, the last one of those in the pay of America's Central Intelligence Agency. It goes without saying that this is not the sort of outcome the nation envisioned when we sent our forces to liberate Iraq last year.

Since the transfer was covered by media, videotaped and sent around the world it's hard to understand the use of the word "secretive."

The Times then calls it a "sensible precaution" against threatened terrorist attacks, but then spends the rest of the editorial lambasting the transfer and speculating on all the worst possible outcomes from here on out.

And since many in the nation "envisioned" an outcome of thousands of U.S. fatalities after months of grueling, door-to-door combat in Baghdad, after the Times' own Johnny Apple suggested there was a Vietnam-like "quagmire" in Afghanistan, shouldn't The Times be a little more upbeat?