After Spy Story, the Times Defends Its Patriotism

Editor's Note

This is posted from the Times Watch Tracker, an online publication which exposes the liberal agenda of the New York Times. See their website at www.timeswatch.org



Perhaps sensing that editor Bill Keller’s arrogant open letter didn't do the job, today’s masthead editorial in the print edition makes another defense of the paper’s latest terrorist-program wrecking scoop, mostly by accusing conservatives of attacking the paper’s patriotism.

The defensive “Patriotism and the Press” begins: “Over the last year, The New York Times has twice published reports about secret antiterrorism programs being run by the Bush administration. Both times, critics have claimed that the paper was being unpatriotic or even aiding the terrorists.”

The Times says publishing classified details on terrorist surveillance isn’t sedition: “The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals. Terrorist groups would have had to be fairly credulous not to suspect that they would be subject to scrutiny if they moved money around through international wire transfers. In fact, a United Nations group set up to monitor Al Qaeda and the Taliban after Sept. 11 recommended in 2002 that other countries should follow the United States' lead in monitoring suspicious transactions handled by Swift. The report is public and available on the United Nations Web site.”

So the Times defense is that it’s just repeating old news. Then why the front-page play?

“Our news colleagues work under the assumption that they should let the people know anything important that the reporters learn, unless there is some grave and overriding reason for withholding the information.”

Except for Mohammad cartoons, of course.

“They try hard not to base those decisions on political calculations, like whether a story would help or hurt the administration. It is certainly unlikely that anyone who wanted to hurt the Bush administration politically would try to do so by writing about the government's extensive efforts to make it difficult for terrorists to wire large sums of money.”

They have half a good point here – it would not surprise Times Watch if Bush’s support actually increased after the revelations of what his administration is trying to do to combat terrorist tactics.

The Times can’t seem to locate any actual civil liberties violations or illegalities in the SWIFT program itself, so it just portrays it as “part” of something that causes liberal vapors at editorial roundtables, which is apparently reason enough to put all the details out for anyone, including enemies, to read. It also sounds, as Michael Goodwin opines at the New York Daily News today, that the paper's long-standing anti-Bush animus played a role in the decision to publish -- if the "Bush administration" hadn't been involved (and note Keller's letter didn't use the generic term "federal government," but specifically the scary "Bush administration") the paper could well have held off.

“From our side of the news-opinion wall, the Swift story looks like part of an alarming pattern. Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has taken the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned it into a rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government. It has created powerful new tools of surveillance and refused, almost as a matter of principle, to use normal procedures that would acknowledge that either Congress or the courts have an oversight role. The Swift program, like the wiretapping program, has been under way for years with no restrictions except those that the executive branch chooses to impose on itself -- or, in the case of Swift, that the banks themselves are able to demand. This seems to us very much the sort of thing the other branches of government, and the public, should be nervously aware of.”

Exactly what “public interest” is being served by making it that much harder to fight terrorism?

Notice there’s nothing said about concerns over SWIFT itself -- if revealing this program was so important, just what are the specific concerns of the paper? The only specific results from the program appear to be positive ones. As the Times itself reported, terrorists have been tracked and caught because of the SWIFT surveillance. Or perhaps we should say “had been tracked and caught,” given that the Times has likely scuttled the program’s effectiveness.

The editorial concludes with petulance over alleged attacks on the Times’ patriotism. “The free press has a central place in the Constitution because it can provide information the public needs to make things right again. Even if it runs the risk of being labeled unpatriotic in the process.”

The Times has yet to say what has gone “wrong” regarding this terrorist surveillance program.

Some more editorial spin from on high, courtesy of Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (hat-tip Tim Graham):

“Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in an interview yesterday that critics ‘are still angry at us’ for disclosing the government's domestic eavesdropping program in December, ‘and I guess in their view, this adds insult to injury….The Bush administration's reaction roused their base, but also roused the anti-Bush base as well,’ he said, noting an approximately even split in his e-mail.”

As if conservatives are automatons waiting for orders from White House central. In fact, the outrage was spontaneous with the paper’s online filing of the story Thursday night, long before Bush’s Monday comment that the Times’ behavior was “disgraceful.”

Tammy Bruce applauds GOP efforts for an investigation but feel they don’t go far enough, and concludes by knocking the Times’ obsession with investigating the Valerie Plame affair: “If the ‘exposure’ of non-spy Valerie Plame deserved a Special Prosecutor, doesn't the exposure and publication of secret war plans deserve an investigation?”