By NYT standards, this is a very decent editorial. Now if they could only put this on the first page where it belonged, there might be hope for American journalism. But of course there's the rub: they can't.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/opinion/28thu1.html
Which is a large part of why the bill will pass -- because w/o this on the front page, all the reams of coverage are worse than white noise -- they're normalizing white noise, legitimizing white noise.
Of course the other part of why this bill is passing is that the Dems are literally terrified of being called soft on terror.
Fwiw, Elizabeth Holtzman had an interesting comment on a part of the bill the NYT Edit board left out: the hidden self pardon:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/68705,CST-EDT-REF23B.article
Michael