No difference. That's why we profess to be a government of laws, not men. It's why we have elections. No one elected the editors at the NY Times or its owners. I would think liberals would be aghast at the idea of corporate fat cats usurping government power.
Every time someone decides to buy or not buy a copy of the NYT they are voting... The people have a much greater power of the NYT through their decision to buy another paper or look to alternative media than the people do with their elected officials. Just please show me one fascist, Communist, Islamic fundamentalist, or totalitarian government that held a free press as vital for their society to keep a watch on government....
So your position is that the media can pick and choose which secret programs to reveal? That our only recourse is to refuse to buy newspapers? Name me one other free government that has that policy. Why the uproar over Bob Novak's column which revealed an important fact that the public didn't know, namely that Joe Wilson had been sent to Africa on his fool's errand by his wife, Valery Plame?
My view is that the media has their job to do, a very important job. Will they make mistakes from time to time? Sure, just as the administration makes mistakes. This is politics from both sides.... We have a republican administration, house, senate, judiciary in the high court...and where can the balance come from? This administration won't let the opposition party know what they are doing, so the press serves their purpose. I mean, it is not as if Fox News is going to do any investigative journalism on this administration...
Goering, you may know, because he'd kicked his opium jones by the time of the trial, proved a shrewd and articulate witness in his own defense. Wonder if Rush will similarly resurge -- I mean the shrewd, articulate part. He's got pills for the other.
This is an interesting way to put it. You know, AAA, the obligatory rhetoric really diminishes your arguments, IMO. It is impossible for me to believe that you have no concept of the legitimate concerns engendered by the actions of this administration. Hap has mentioned that he doesn't feel that any end runs have been attempted, end runs around the law. I respect his opinion, but Gitmo is just the most obvious example of situations in which the law has been ignored. Not all journalists are 'power drunk media execs'. There do exist journalists who are simply taking the intelligence that comes their way, researching it, and then making their findings available to the public. That is their job. To say that there is no need for journalists and society in general to keep an eye on (especially this) administration is basically like saying 'I don't give a fuck what you say - we are at war and we can do whatever we want and if you don't like it, leave'. Is that what you're saying? If so... why don't you just come right out and say it, as opposed to hiding behind this kind of rhetoric? If you are syaing that you support all the actions of this administration and you also support the rule of law, you have a contradiction on your hands, right? Or do you consider Gitmo to be a legal action?
Quote from AAAintheBeltway: "Do we entrust revealing the nation's secrets to a cabal of power-drunk media exec's, who are clearly motivated by political considerations, or do we trust the rule of law?" Uh-huh.........do we trust power mad exec's, motivated by politics......or the rule of law...........written and interpreted by power mad politician's? I see a conundrum, not rhetoric.:eek: Or at least i would, if AAA had'nt written it
General Faults Marine Response to Iraq Killings By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID S. CLOUD WASHINGTON, July 7 â The second-ranking American commander in Iraq has concluded that some senior Marine officers were negligent in failing to investigate more aggressively the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians by marines in Haditha last November, two Defense Department officials said Friday. The officer, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, concluded that in the deaths, including those of 10 women and children and an elderly man in a wheelchair, senior officers failed to follow up on inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the initial reporting of the incident that should have raised questions. General Chiarelli faulted the senior staff of the Second Marine Division, commanded at the time by Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, and the Second Regimental Combat Team, then headed by Col. Stephen W. Davis, and recommended unspecified disciplinary action for some officers, said the two defense officials, who have been briefed on General Chiarelli's findings. They said they would discuss the report, after being promised anonymity, because it showed that the military takes these incidents seriously and fully investigates them. "He concludes that some officers were derelict in their duties," said one of the officials, who declined to identify which or how many officers were singled out. If Marine commanders are found to have been negligent in pursuing the matter, the punishments could range from a relatively mild admonishment to a court martial that potentially could end their military careers. It was not clear Friday whether General Huck or Colonel Davis, or Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, the senior marine officer in Iraq at the time, would be personally implicated. But if they were to be disciplined, they would be among the most senior American officers punished since the Iraq war started in early 2003. An officer who served in Iraq with the Second Marine Division at the time of the killings in Haditha noted that a spate of recent cases in which American troops were being investigated for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians â including the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and the killing of her family in Mahmudiya â had raised concerns that commanders may be under pressure to make an example of Marine officers in the Haditha incident. "We're all waiting anxiously to see how this one gets taken on," said the officer, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about the unit or any part of the investigation. "Major General Huck is about as thorough and detailed a guy as you are ever going to see." In a brief statement issued from Iraq on Friday, General Chiarelli's headquarters said he had finished reviewing a lengthy investigation by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army into the actions or absence of actions by Marine leaders in Haditha, as well as the training that marines had received and the command climate their superiors had fostered. But the statement gave no details of General Chiarelli's findings or recommendations, which will now be sent to his boss, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq. A senior Pentagon official said it could be several days before Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld receives a complete briefing on the matter, and before a redacted version of General Chiarelli's findings are made public. In addition to General Chiarelli's review, a separate inquiry by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is examining whether crimes were committed when a squad of marines killed the 24 Iraqi civilians after a roadside bomb killed a member of the Third Platoon of Company K, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, in the early morning of Nov. 19. In April, when the Third Battalion returned to Camp Pendleton, Calif., from Iraq, the battalion and company commanders were relieved of their commands for what their commander said was "a lack of confidence in their leadership." According to one of the defense officials, General Chiarelli embraced all of General Bargewell's findings and expanded upon some of them. In one instance of a missed opportunity to investigate further, the official said, General Bargewell noted that the comptroller of the Second Marine Division, who was responsible for making condolence payments to families of the Iraqis killed, told the unit's staff judge advocate that additional investigation was needed. That review never happened, and the Marines paid a total of $38,000 to families of 15 of the civilians killed. In his own set of conclusions, General Chiarelli recommended that American forces in Iraq receive additional counterinsurgency training both in the United States before deploying, and once in Iraq. "From your basic recruit to commanders, he's calling for a refinement of the counterinsurgency approach," said one of the defense officials. Since the military inquiries into the Haditha killings began, the accounts given by some marines involved and their lawyers have conflicted in important details with descriptions of what investigators have found, officials familiar with their findings have said. After the roadside bomb went off, marines who survived the explosion said they believed they were under sustained attack and that they were entitled under their rules of engagement to use lethal force as they searched surrounding houses for those who they believed were responsible for the bombing. But investigators and townspeople told reporters that the marines overreacted to a fatal roadside bombing and shot the civilians, only one of whom was armed, in cold blood. The 24 Iraqis killed included five men in a taxi and 19 other civilians in several houses, which marines and their lawyers say they cleared using grenades and blind fire. But investigators have also concluded that most of the victims in three houses died from well-aimed rifle shots, not shrapnel or random fire, according to military officials familiar with the initial findings. The houses where the killings took place show no evidence of the violent room-clearing assault described by the marines and their lawyers, the officials said. General Bargewell was assigned by General Chiarelli to look at how commanders responded to the incident, including whether there was any attempt at covering up what happened or whether discrepancies in accounts of the incident should have been investigated. Marine commanders in Iraq have said that they became aware within two days of the killings that civilians had died from gunfire, not from the bomb explosion. They told investigators that they did not view the discrepancies in accounts of what happened as unusual in the aftermath of combat and that they had no reason to think at the time that any civilians had been killed deliberately. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/w...&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
A return to the New York Times' swift disaster By Austin Bay Wednesday, November 1, 2006 October Surprise? This year, October began on Sunday, June 23, when The New York Times sprang this election's first, most odious and most damaging "media revelation." I'm referring to the Times' faux-expose of the productive and legal counter-terrorist finance intelligence operation that involved the Belgium-based consortium the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). That operation gleaned information that helped nab terrorist kingpin Hambali, the architect of the 2002 Bali (Indonesia) terror massacre. After the Times exposed this classified operation, I wrote a column asking why the Times editors had done something so fundamentally stupid. My guess: "The simple power to do it is one explanation -- and that's the power of a bully. ... The Times obviously believes it can expose intelligence secrets and pay no penalty." Times enablers greeted all critique with the usual rhetorical parries. We heard "the free press" defense -- as if the intelligence community wasn't engaged in defending the system that permits a free press. The Times and its national media enablers (by innuendo) suggested the Bush administration might be engaged in illegal spying on innocent people, though the June article admitted the program was limited "to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to al-Qaida by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry." Last week, the Times' "public editor," Byron Calame, issued a lame "mea culpa." He wrote he hadn't "found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws." (Earth to Calame: We told you that in June.) Calame added: "My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: The Times article and headline had both emphasized that a 'secret' program was being exposed." Thus, the Times exposes its own bubble world. Remember, this "elite" fish-wrapper attacks Weblogs and makes derisive fun of George Bush's verbal miscues. Throughout the summer, I read volumes of informed criticism of the Times --criticism the Times' staff pooh-poohed. Now, it seems Calame and Times Editor in Chief Bill Keller were neither informed enough nor concerned enough to understand the criticism, much less understand the damage their clique did to America's ability to conduct multilateral intelligence programs. Remember the word "multilateral?" That's what John Kerry-type Democrats claim our effort in Iraq is not. The SWIFT program was a meticulously constructed multinational covert operation that had the cooperation of Belgium, Spain and other European nations. The Times' revelation not only damaged the SWIFT program as an individual effort, but damaged the "inside diplomacy" that organized it and ensured its legality. I've discussed the SWIFT debacle with my contacts in the U.S. intelligence and defense technology communities, and asked for an estimate of what it would cost to reconstitute a SWIFT-type intel program. Gut estimates range from $400 million to $500 million -- a hefty quantity of taxpayer cash. Complete program reconstitution probably isn't necessary. SWIFT may still be operating, but if it is it operates with reduced effectiveness -- the Times' tipped off al-Qaida. Not surprisingly, every source has stressed the qualitative damage done to the political-diplomatic side of multilateral intelligence cooperation. The New York Times calculates it can defend itself against criminal charges involving the publication of classified material. Times editors intend to play "media martyrs" defending the First Amendment against a "government attack on a fundamental right." But we must speak truth to media as well as government and corporate abuse of power. Perhaps the U.S. government should file a civil lawsuit to recover the loss of a significant defense and intelligence investment. No, I'm not a lawyer, but it's fair to ask if the Times did quantifiable damage to U.S. taxpayers. If it did, how much? Two hundred million dollars? Fifty million? Or did it do zero damage? Calame belatedly recognizes a corporate error by his employer. In most cases, an apology more than suffices. However, if the SWIFT expose hurt critical security efforts in the midst of a counter-terror war (which many people believe it did), then it went beyond legitimate political speech or reporting and became an arrogant, stupid, wanton, reckless act that wreaked qualitative and quantitative damage. American soldiers and intelligence agents have their lives on the line. The Bush administration needs to back their effort with a demonstration of political grit and at least consider asking a jury (of taxpayers) to consider the matter.