At least so it seems, what with KGB-like operations happening within the US -- you know, things like spying on American citizens -- and pressuring the media to kill news stories.

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.

To be sure, we don't have it as bad as the Russians, whose President (for life) has been marching around through newsrooms with heavy jack boots and just today got his economic minister to resign [* previously omitted link added]:

"It is one thing to work in a partly free country, which Russia was six years ago. It is quite another when the country has ceased to be politically free," he said Tuesday, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Illarionov, who has also criticized what he says is a return to inefficient state control of the economy, complained that he was no longer able to speak his mind.

"I considered it important to remain here at this post as long as I had the possibility to do something, including speaking out," he said, according to ITAR-Tass. "Until recently, no one put any restrictions on me expressing my point of view. Now the situation has changed."

Back in the USA, newspaper editors tell us in their newspapers that, so far, they've resisted Bush attempts to quash news stories. Sort of.

After Bush's meeting with the Times executives, first reported by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, the president assailed the paper's piece on domestic spying, calling the leak of classified information "shameful." Some liberals, meanwhile, attacked the paper for holding the story for more than a year after earlier meetings with administration officials.

You gotta love that. Apparently only liberals care if the government is telling the truth, or whether the mainstream media are conspiring with propaganda efforts.

"The decision to hold the story last year was mine," Keller says. "The decision to run the story last week was mine. I'm comfortable with both decisions. Beyond that, there's just no way to have a full discussion of the internal procedural twists that media writers find so fascinating without talking about what we knew, when, and how -- and that I can't do."

Some Times staffers say the story was revived in part because of concerns that Risen is publishing a book on the CIA next month that will include the disclosures. But Keller told the Los Angeles Times: "The publication was not timed to the Iraqi election, the Patriot Act debate, Jim's forthcoming book or any other event."

Translation: Bill Keller didn't think that a story about the Bush administration quite probably breaking the law and certainly the public trust by spying on Americans was newsy enough a year ago, but now it can get some hot buzz coming off of other news events.

I think I prefer the book idea better.

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