If the NYTimes had been around in 1775 …
… these headlines are what you would have been reading.
Sad – but true.
On a related note, make sure to check out Thomas Sowell’s piece on the NYT’s revelation of how the US gov’t has gone about tracking financial transactions of suspected terrorists.
He is right on, as always.
Related: AJ Strata points to a NYT piece today that talks about the ‘struggles’ the media faces when deciding whether or not to print information they know to be sensitive. Scott Shane from the NYT writes:
KATHARINE GRAHAM, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 2001, backed her editors through tense battles during the Watergate era. But in a 1986 speech, she warned that the media sometimes made “tragic” mistakes.
Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.
“This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities” Ms. Graham said.
Jeff Goldstein nails it:
I don’t blame certain press organs for their zealousness. I blame them for irresponsibility and violation of the public trust when their self-evident ideological leanings cloud their editorial judgment, putting all of usβregardless of political affiliationβin danger. In short, I despise the kind of arrogance that presumes to speak on behalf of “the public good” when it comes from those whose understanding of the classified military and intelligence programs on which they are “reporting” is so tenuous as to barely be able to hold the weight of their own self-serving pronouncements, and whose idea of the “public good” is aligned almost entirely to their very specific ideological worldviews.
The press may not think we are at war. But they should respect that the Presidentβand a majority of the citizens of this country, who twice now elected himβbelieve that we are, and that it is the administration’s job to decide on a national security posture, not the job of malcontents within the intelligence services, or politicians looking to score partisan points, or the editors of the New York Timesβall of whose actions have the practical effect of undermining that national security posture.
And the excuse that the enemy (such as it is) has, in effect, already scooped themβmaking their revelations titilating to the American public but toothless with respect to the terroristsβis, frankly, insulting and cynical.
Which is why those news outlets that print classified information on programs they either know or suspect to be lawfulβagainst the pleadings of both the administration and others in Congress that doing so will harm our security postureβshould be treated with disdain.
Amen.
Prior/Related:
- NYT and LAT ask: When Do We Publish a Secret?
- NYTimes continues to undermine national security in the name of the Γ’β¬Λpublic interest’
- Memo to the NYT/IHT: Trying to detect unusual calling patterns is not “eavesdropping”
- NSA ‘scandal’ leak fallout continues – AT&T and Verizon being sued
- The ACLU has a database of its own – and more NSA news
- The latest non-scandal scandal news involving the NSA
- FDR and domestic surveillance
- NSA ‘scandal’ fallout: convicted terrorist conspirators wanting cases thrown out
- Intelligence officials: NSA leak has undermined ability to fight terrorism
- NYT: NSA scandal is worse than WWII Japanese internment camps
- Link between disposable phone sale surge and NSA leak?
- Gray Lady Down – a slam against the NYT
- “If 1941 Were 2005”
- The media’s war
- Winning in spite of defeatist attitudes
- The undermining of this war