America in the Balance

NEW YORK TIMES: WHAT WAS IT

THINKING? I MEAN REALLY THINKING

by

Ken Eliasberg

What do you think the Gray Lady had in mind when it took upon itself to declassify the government’s monitoring program? What greater good was it serving? Could we possibly be safer by virtue of this noble gesture by the Times – saving us, not from Osama, but from someone far worse – George Bush!!!

Before looking to their motivation, let’s try to analyze their position, with an eye toward determining the possible merit of their taking this liberty, and what right they had to do so. First, the Times notes that it was in the public’s interest to receive this information. Oh! How so? I would think that, in a time of war, the public’s principal interest is in national security, i.e their safety. How does blowing the cover on a classified program square with this concern? Simple, it doesn’t.

A variation on this theme is that the Public has a right to know? Really? Why? Pursuing that line of reasoning to a logical conclusion, the public would have a right to know just about everything that the government is doing. On that basis, why bother to classify any material? By the way, the fact that we are at war – although the Democrats go to great pains to downplay this fact – is not critical to the classification process. Even during times of peace, the government is still not obliged to conduct its intelligence activities in broad daylight. Intelligcnce, by its very nature, is a covert underaking. As previously noted, it would seem that the left’s thinking along these lines has led to the steady erosion of our intelligence capacity over the last 3 or 4 decades.

Could it be that the Public needs to know? Again, why and by whose reckoning? To the extent that the public wants to know anything – and given our present level of intellectual curiosity, this appears to be a questionable premise – all that they really want to know is that the government has their back. I really don’t care how you keep me and my family safe; I just want to know that the programs you have employed are calculated to do so. Again, recent studies regarding the public’s level of ignorance suggest that there is very little that they want to know, even when it concerns things that it is in their best interest to know. Moreover, and more to the point, taking this approach would suggest that the Times, not the U.S. Government, is the final arbiter of what should and should not be classified.

So please, spare me this garbage that you were doing it for me; in point of fact, I suspect I am less safe – possibly, considerably less safe – as the result of the Times’s revelation than I was before. But thanks anyway, Bill Keller; I can’t tell you what a comfort it is in knowing that you are looking out for me.

Finally, how about the Times’s First Amendment right to publish this information, regardless of the wisdom of its having done so. Don’t they have an unrestricted right to publish anything they want? NO!!! An oft-cited ex-ception to the broad sweep of the First-Amendment-freedom granted the Press is the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre argument. One cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre (unless, of course, there is a fire). To me, blowing our cover in a time of war is far worse than shouting fire in a crowded theatre. Perhaps a few people might – I emphasize might – get killed in the rush to evacuate the theatre in question. But that loss pales into insignificance when contrasted with the damage that Islamic thugs might do to innocents because they were able to reroute their financing arrangements courtesy of the Gray Lady.

In short, the Times’s decision to publish the details of the SWIFT program was wrong and terribly irresponsible. Consequently, viewed in a light most favorable to the Times, the only conclusion that one can reach is that the Times acted irresponsibly and exercised incredibly bad judgment. However, this conclusion emanates from a premise that finds little support in the Times’s previous behavior, i.e. their unrelenting hostility to George Bush and their constant effort to demonstrate that he is prone to act in secrecy and that there is something both sinister and illegal in his doing so.

The Times has been in the tank for the Democrats for some time, and has made very little effort to conceal their displeasure with this president and their desire to bring him down. Their commentary is replete with signs of their ill will; their previous effort to expose him with respect to classified information was, of course, the NSA program (which was equally within the law). NSA and SWIFT are efforts to secure information, a necessary, if not always laudable, undertaking when there are people who want to kill you. This is not the equivalent of suspending Habeas Corpus (done by Lincoln during the Civil War), or incarcerating an overheated dissident (done by Wilson to Debs during the course of WWI), or interning citizens who originate from a country with whom we at war (FDR and the Japanese-Americans during WWII) – while, on reflection, these efforts so secure the common good might seem a bit overheated, they all passed muster at the time because the public recognized and responded to the fact that we were at war. While such measures might not pass muster today, they did then, and they each represented a far greater inroad to our civil liberties than anything in the Patriot Act, NSA, SWIFT, or anything else that George Bush has done.

The commentary on this act of betrayal has been almost universally condemnatory; the 4 or 5 pieces that I particularly recommend are, National Security Be Damned – The guiding philosophy on West 43^rd Street by Heather MacDonald, in the Weekly Standard’s online edition of 7/23/06 (you can never go wrong with a Heather MacDonald effort; she is an excellent journalist); Fit and Unfit to Print – What are the obligations of the press in wartime? by the editors of the Wall St. Journal in their Opinion Journal online publication of June 30^th (in this regard, it is interesting to observe the division within the WSJ; on the one side is their editorial position which disapproved of the Times’s publication, and, on the other, is the reporting side, which, following the Times’s lead, also published the SWIFT piece), and, finally, two pieces by Gabriel Schoenfeld dealing with the question of the Times’s prosecutorial vulnerability with respect to their revelation, both appear in the Weekly Standard, the former entitled Leaks and the Law – The case for prosecuting the New York Times, online edition of July 3^rd, and All the News That’s Fit to Prosecute – Should the Justice Department go after journalists?, appearing in the July 17^th issue of the magazine itself. All four pieces are well worth reading, and there are dozens more that are all quite good (none of which are particularly complementary regarding the Times’s decision to publish).

We’ll look at what to do with the Times, as well as one of its reporter’s (Paul Krugman) efforts to whitewash their conduct, next week (stay tuned).