Circling the Collective Wagons

The NY Times' Bill Keller and the LA Times'Dean Baquet co-authored an op-ed that evades the central issue against their publishing the secret SWIFT program. They evade talking about that central issue by predictably wrapping themselves in the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court case and the First Amendment. Suffice it to say it didn't disguise their intent. Here's part of their charade:

How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect? Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could be seen and used by insurgents.

This is pure BS. (That's B as in Barbra & S as in Streisand.) How is it easy to not "divulge operational intelligence" in "news reports" from Iraq and Afghanistan but easy to "divulge operational intelligence" in how the Treasury Department is conducting a covert operation that tracks money transfers en route to the terrorists?

Please don't insult me by saying that the terrorist already knew we were surveilling them, that your reporting didn't disclose anything new. That's insulting. If they knew what we were doing, would they have used the system to such an extent that one of the world's biggest terrorists, Hambali, would get caught as a result of this program? If they knew, they wouldn't use this system. PERIOD.

They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work.

That's likely true to an extent but I'm not buying into this notion of it being "long, painstaking work." Rather, I think there's a network of Bush-hating intel people funnelling this information into the reporters' arms.

They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check.

You're kidding, right? Don't feed me that line of garbage. These sources aren't scared. When they're exposed, they're hailed as whistlblowers who speak truth to power; they're hailed as noble Davids protecting us from the evil Bush administration's Goliath. And don't feed me this nonsense about your double- and triple-checking stories. If you did that, there wouldn't have been a Jayson Blair scandal. If there's such a rigorous fact-checking process, why has it become a regular feature of the NARN radio broadcast to ridicule the NY Times' inaccurate reporting week after week?

Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.

That's as laughable a line as I've read in this op-ed. Since when is naming the specific banking program used in this terrorist tracking program not part of the operational aspect of the program? Just by publishing that detail, they know how they can re-route their money transfers.

We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices, to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.

It isn't possible that people of integrity could disagree with the damaging effects of these disclosures. The decision to publish an article about an effective program that the NY Times says doesn't break any laws because it's "in the public's interest" is a flimsy excuse to publish such a valuable program as the TFTP.

Wrapping yourself in the First Amendment won't hide that.

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Posted Saturday, July 1, 2006 8:12 PM

June 2006 Posts

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