Collusion Between Al-Journalism and Government Traitors

You must be confused.

 

NYT: Bank program not news to terrorists

Sun Jul 2, 7:40 PM ET

Published reports that the U.S. was monitoring international banking transactions were not news to the terrorists who were its target because the Bush administration had already "talked openly" about the effort, The New York Times' top editor said Sunday.

In defending his paper's decision to reveal details of the program, Times executive editor Bill Keller told an interviewer on CBS's "Face the Nation" that such operations are important to an informed public.

"I don't think the threshold test of whether you write about how the government is waging the war on terror is whether they've done something that's blatantly illegal or outrageous," Keller said. "I think you probably would like to know what they're doing that's successful as well."

Reports in several newspapers last month that the White House was tracking terrorist-related financial transactions in the international banking system triggered a new storm of criticism, primarily from Republicans, about news disclosures of secret U.S. efforts to pre-empt terrorist plots and activities.

President Bush said the latest revelation was "disgraceful" and did "great harm" to the country. Rep. Peter King (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, reiterated his view on CNN's "Late Edition" on Sunday that The Times should be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act for repeatedly revealing classified information.

"The Times can't have it both ways," King said. "They can't on the one hand say there's no harm in releasing this. Everybody knew about it. But on the other hand, we had to put it on Page One because it was so top secret."

Keller, on CBS, said it is the government that "likes to have it both ways. ... They confide in us when they want to advertise the programs that are successful. And then they rebuke us if we write about something they would prefer we didn't write about."

He added that he is only a little surprised by the level of criticism the paper is receiving.

"I mean, it's an election year. Beating up on The New York Times is red meat for the conservative base," Keller said. "But I don't think this is all politics. I think the administration is a little embarrassed. This is the most secretive White House we've had since the Nixon White House."

Keller told CBS host Bob Scheiffer that "when lives are clearly at risk," The Times often withholds information from publication.

"But this was a case where clearly the terrorists or the people who finance them know quite well, because the Treasury Department and the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor international banking transactions. It's not news to the terrorists," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060702...3tBX9pH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

 

On Meet the Press this morning, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest snap back at Bill Bennett. She said it is not a crime to disclose classified information and then went on to say that people would like to make casino gambling against the law, but it is not illegal. Bill Bennett, who has previously admitted a gambling problem, sat in stunned silence like he had just been punched hard in the stomach. It was a classic moment

http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/07/02/dana-priest-smacks-bill-bennett-around/

Dana Priest made him look like a fool as he stood there shaking his head. Bennett made himself look like the WATB that he is as he constantly tried to interrupt. Yes Bill, we know you’re right there, but there were three other people on the panel as well. Immediately, he went to the "I’m all alone on the panel" card as if he didn’t know the make up of the round table. ( I seem to remember that Harwood is from the WSJ and Safire was a conservative columnist) Priest got into him a second time over the prison story. Even Andrea Mitchell had a go at Bill.

 

TIMES 2, BUSH 0 Pat Buchanan

Fri Jun 30, 6:50 AM ET

"For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America."

So said President Bush of The New York Times' revelation of a secret U.S. program to monitor the international cash transfers of suspected terrorists. "Disgraceful," added an angry president.

Vice President Cheney assailed news organizations that "take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people."

Of the Times' decision to expose the secret program, House Speaker Dennis Hastert says: "This is not news. This is something that has been classified; something that is top secret."

Treasury Secretary John Snow wrote Times editor Bill Keller, "In choosing to expose this program despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle ... the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorist program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails."

The U.S. government has thus declared that what the Times did was reprehensible, and rendered aid and comfort to the enemy.

But if Bush believes that, why hasn't his Justice Department been directed to investigate these crimes against the Espionage Act and acts of treason in a time of war?

Rhetoric aside, the core issue here is this:

Does Bush believe the Times committed a crime in exposing the secret financial tracking program and the secret National Security Agency program to intercept U.S. phone calls of suspected terrorists -- for which the Times won a Pulitzer? If he does, why has he not acted?

Why has he not ordered Justice to dig out the disloyal leakers and prosecute their media collaborators, who refused White House requests not to compromise these vital programs? If Bush believes what he is saying, why does he not do his duty as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?

Asked if the White House would retaliate against the Times, Press Secretary Tony Snow said, "The New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know in some cases might override somebody's right to live."

Nice statement, but the Times' response is: We did reflect, Tony, and we decided to publish. An unstated corollary is: And what are you going to do about it?

The answer so far is that the Bushites are going to do nothing other than fulminate and pound the Post and Times. Bush has every right to do so, and the tactic is effective, for even opponents of the war do not believe journalists are above the law and enjoy special rights to expose security secrets to sabotage any war effort they no longer agree with.

On this issue, Rep. Peter King (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y., is right. He has called for an investigation of the leakers of these secret programs and criminal prosecution of the editors and the publisher of the Times:

"The time has come for the American people to realize and The New York Times to realize we're at war and they can't just be on their own deciding what we declassify, what to release."

Editorialists at the Times and The Washington Post and their kennel-fed columnists and "media critics" are trotting out all the bromides about "the meaning of the First Amendment," "the people's right to know," "the role of the press in a democratic society," etc. And it is a slam-dunk prediction that more Pulitzers and People's Hero awards, like the ones Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews collected for the Times, are ahead.

Behind the Times' defiance of the law surely lies a gnawing need for redemption. For the Times has been through a bad patch. First, it was revealed Jayson ("Burning Down My Master's House") Blair had hoked up three dozen stories and smoked them right past the Times' editors, who were blinded by the brilliance of their black prodigy. Then, there came the revelation that editor Howell Raines directed the paper to run three dozen stories on the human rights atrocity at Augusta National, where some good ole boys had conspired to keep the girls out of their tree house. After that, there was the Judith Miller fiasco, where the Times stood firm -- then folded in the face of some really big-time fines.

Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger appear to have decided the way to recapture lost credibility is to publish national security secrets, as in the Pentagon Papers days of yore.

And, thus far, for all their huffing and puffing, the Bushites have blinked. But this cannot stand. For appeasement will beget new acts of arrogance and aggression by the Times, and other newspapers, until a White House finds the courage to demand that the Times, too, obeys the laws and respects our national security secrets, even if it means putting Bill and Art in the Graybar Hotel for a spell.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20060630...CD8aKLdOun9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM-

 

7/2/2006

Eric Lichtblau, Meet Your Own Story and Headline

Eric Lichtblau’s story in the New York Times, June 22:

Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

Eric Lichtblau today, on CNN’s Reliable Sources:

“USA Today”, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into—outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret.

Ah, you say, but the reporters don’t write the headlines. Yeah, but they write the story, don’t they? Here, courtesy of Chris Fotos, is a bullet-point list of quotes from the story saying that the program was secret:

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after theSept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database…

Officials described the Swift program as the biggest and most far-reaching of several secret efforts to trace terrorist financing….

Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The New YorkTimes on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

Swift executives have been uneasy at times about their secret role, the government and industry officials said….

While the banking program is a closely held secret, administration officials have held classified briefings for some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 commission, the officials said….

Swift’s 25-member board of directors, made up of representatives from financial institutions around the world, was previously told of the program. The Group of 10’s central banks, in major industrialized countries, which oversee Swift, were also informed. It is not clear if other network participants know that American intelligence officials can examine their message traffic.

In terrorism prosecutions, intelligence officials have been careful to “sanitize,” or hide the origins of evidence collected through the
program to keep it secret, officials said.

The idea for the Swift program, several officials recalled, grew out of a suggestion by a Wall Street executive, who told a senior Bush
administration official about Swift’s database. Few government officials knew much about the consortium, which is led by a Brooklyn native, Leonard H. Schrank, but they quickly discovered it offered unparalleled access to international transactions.

Despite the controls, Swift executives became increasingly worried
about their secret involvement with the American government, the officials said.

Hint for Mr. Lichtblau: when they get you under oath, you’ll be much better off if the lies are less obvious than this.

 

Fair enough, Nik. Either you believe that the Administration is doing "end runs" or you don't. Clearly you believe the former, and I am in the camp of the latter. As it applies to this particular program, I do not believe it to be illegal or bending the Constitution in any form.

I can't see the suspension of civil liberties occurring in this country with the situation as it is right now. There would be a massive revolt by the vast majority of this country, the right included.

Having said that, if a nuke or chemical attack occurs on American soil and kills tens of thousands or more - all bets are off.

 

June 26, 2006

A word from Lt. Cotton

Lt. Tom Cotton writes this morning from Baghdad with a word for the New York Times:

Dear Messrs. Keller, Lichtblau & Risen:

Congratulations on disclosing our government's highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program (June 23). I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq. (Alas, operational security and common sense prevent me from even revealing this unclassified location in a private medium like email.)

Unfortunately, as I supervised my soldiers late one night, I heard a booming explosion several miles away. I learned a few hours later that a powerful roadside bomb killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company. I deeply hope that we can find and kill or capture the terrorists responsible for that bomb. But, of course, these terrorists do not spring from the soil like Plato's guardians. No, they require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs in exchange for a few months' salary. As your story states, the program was legal, briefed to Congress, supported in the government and financial industry, and very successful.

Not anymore. You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion -- or next time I feel it -- I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.

And, by the way, having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others -- laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.

Very truly yours,

Tom Cotton
Baghdad, Iraq

 

July 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributors
When Do We Publish a Secret?
By DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times

SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.

Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.

We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country's security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both our papers braved the collapsing towers to convey the horror to the world.

We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press's drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.

In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.

As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently in the pages of that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

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.

Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.

The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. 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. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. 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. We seek out sources with different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.

Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times's decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration's case for secrecy.

But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, The Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar.

It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.

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.

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.

— DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times

 

Intereresting articles all. Bottom line though is the same. 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?

Some in the media imagine that the First Amendment gives them the final call. The Pentagon Papers case, which was clearly wrongly decided in my judgment by a highly partisan Court caught up in the anti-Nixon lynch mob, however only makes it very difficult for the government to stop publication ("prior restraint"), not prosecute it after the fact.

I do agree with Pat Buchanan, however, that it is incumbent upon the adminstration, at least if they are to be taken seriously, to move past bombast and actually initiate prosecutions. Let us discover who leaked and punish them appropriately. Let us use these cases to define what the media can do.

 

Why would the media exec's be any more power drunk than the politicians, especially those with a "mandate?"

LOL...