The reporters at the NY Times recently did all they could to lengthen the Global War on Terror (GWT) and kill more American military personnel stationed overseas. They had help, of course, in the form of “anonymous sources”, a polite way of referring to treasonous bastards who have, in fact, broken the law they swore to uphold when they were hired by the government.

WASHINGTON, June 22 — Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

What the NY Times reporters fail to add to the end of that last paragraph is this sentence: “Of course, now that we have informed the terrorist leaders and their financial backers of exactly how America is tracking them down, this program is now pretty much worthless and will no longer enable America to find and eliminate terrorist threats.”

The Bush Administration asked the NY Times not to publish the article, citing continuing operations and the need for air-tight security. The editor of the NY Times, Bill Keller, decided that rather than listen to the Administration that the public had voted into office, he himself would be the arbiter of what was in the best interests of the United States.

Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said: “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

Translation: If you think I’m going to pass up a Pulitzer Prize just to protect the lives of American military personnel, you’re nuts! The war is illegal and immoral anyway, so their safety doesn’t matter.

Just exactly what is Bill Keller telling people who write in to complain about this? Well, here are some excerpts from a letter that he is sending out:

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government’s anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that’s the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

One of the first things he does is to bring politics into play. He thinks by describing the people who are complaining as “conservative bloggers” he can easily dismiss the concerns they raise as noise from a group of nuts. If you read the entire letter, you’ll note that he never once addresses any of these concerns in a meaningful way; he only says things like “the argument was given in a half-hearted way.” Also, notice how he tries to make a moral equivalence between what the NY Times did and what bloggers did. Most blogs, even the most popular ones, have little more than a tenth of the readership of the NY Times. We weren’t the ones who drew attention to this, the NY Times was.

The press and the government generally start out from opposite corners in such cases. The government would like us to publish only the official line, and some of our elected leaders tend to view anything else as harmful to the national interest. For example, some members of the Administration have argued over the past three years that when our reporters describe sectarian violence and insurgency in Iraq, we risk demoralizing the nation and giving comfort to the enemy. Editors start from the premise that citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news, and that the more they know the better they will be able to make their views known to their elected officials. Our default position — our job — is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate, and our biggest failures have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration’s claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not “why publish?” but “why would we withhold information of significance?” We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.

Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it’s the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements.

The first thing he does here is to paint the government as an entity which thinks its citizens are stupid, and that the NY Times thinks they’re smart. In fact, the opposite is true. You need look no further than the Jason Blair episode to see how the NY Times regards its readers. Next, he tries to justify what the NY Times did by equating it to what happened at the Bay of Pigs. Of course, the GWT is significantly different from the Cold War, but this editor won’t let the facts get in the way of a really neat analogy.

Next, Keller explains that his job is to answer the question “why would we withhold information of significance?” Looking at the SWIFT program, the answer to this is rather obvious to those of us who are on the side of freedom and liberty: you withhold this information to allow the government to continue to use the SWIFT program effectively against terrorist threats and to limit as much as possible the danger to our troops in the field. Apparently, these things are not “compelling” enough to Keller.

It’s not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective, but the story cites strong arguments from proponents that this is the case. While some experts familiar with the program have doubts about its legality, which has never been tested in the courts, and while some bank officials worry that a temporary program has taken on an air of permanence, we cited considerable evidence that the program helps catch and prosecute financers of terror, and we have not identified any serious abuses of privacy so far. A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don’t know about it.

Simply stated, he says that in order for the public to form a judgment on this activity, they must know about it. He completely bypasses the pivotal question of whether the public should know about the activity in the first place. When the public puts in place a government under the system we use, it is understood that the it is going to have the need for covert operations to protect its citizens. It is also understood that said covert operations will not be disclosed to the public until such time as they are no longer is use, in order to protect their effectiveness and to protect the people who are participating in the activity. It is not up to the NY Times, or any other newspaper, to decide which covert government operations to expose, especially in a time of war. Indeed, there is absolutely no good whatsoever that has come of the exposure of this covert operation, unless you’re a terrorist. If you’re a terrorist, you now know exactly how America is monitoring the International Banking System, and you now know exactly what you must do to avoid such monitoring. Keller, of course, dismisses this with perhaps his weakest argument of all:

A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.

So, because he felt the government made this argument in a half-hearted way, he would just dismiss it. I wonder if his arrogance was inherited or learned. In either case, it is clearly clouding his judgment. Remember who we’re dealing with here: terrorists who have waited as long as ten years before carrying out an operation. Efficiency is not their chief concern.

In summation, the editors of the NY Times, in particular Bill Keller, feel that their need to publish a story is more important than the safety of our overseas military personnel and the need for security for our covert operations in times of war. In truth, they don’t care a whit about your “right to know” or some “public interest.” Hell, they can’t even give a clear-cut definition of “public interest.”

I can give you a clear-cut definition of “public interest”: The public interest is that which promotes the welfare, safety, and security of a society, or the people charged with protecting and defending that society. Pretty simple, huh?

Now, show me how what the editors of the NY Times did fits the definition of “public interest.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 1:33 pm by Nick, and is filed under Conspiracy, Culture War, History, Journalism, Military, Politics, War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.