NYT discloses secret program to track terrorist finances.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Nuke, check out KUBARK (1963). CIA psychological torture manual.

 

The basic precepts they developed for effective psychological torture were:

1. sensory deprivation (hooding, sleep dep, sleep deprival, 24 hr. a day lights etc.)

2. self inflicted pain (stress positions)

 

These were later refined in the 1980s when the new (declassified) torture manual came out discussing the finer points of both physical and psychological torture.

Sounds like some interesting reading. I wish my clearance was one level higher.

 

So spare me that it isn't "brutal". It is psychological torture pure and simple. And Nuke, regarding "saving people via torture" -- that's the thing THE FBI SAID THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE IS NOT EFFECTIVE AT GETTING TRUTHFUL INFORMATION.

 

 

 

The torture of suspects did not lead to any useful intelligence information being extracted. - James Corum, professor at the Army Command and General Staff College

 

That's their opinion. Im willing to bet there there quite a few people in the SF and CIA community who would beg to differ.

 

And what about the legendary Marine interrogation tactics of Major Sherwood F. Moran during WW II? He used empathy to establish intellectual and spiritual rapport with Japanese prisoners. Rejecting the idea that the enemy was a group of fanatics who required tough tactics, Moran, who was fluent in Japanese, approached each prisoner talking as a human being to a human being. His manual of these methods persuaded the Navy and Marines to train their interrogators in Japanese language and culture, producing grads who were among the most effective interrogators in the Pacific campaign of 1944 and 1945, supplying complete Japanese order of battle intel on Saipan and Tinian within forty eight hours of landing.

 

So the proof is in the pudding that non-violent techniques without psychological or physical torture do elicit more accurate information than their more nefarious counterparts.

 

I'd love to know how Nuke thinks we'd get accurate information from victims of psychological or physical torture. Cuz I sure know I'd trust a paranoid, incoherent speaking, disoriented, delusional person.

 

Do you honestly think that any interrogator whether you classify him as abusive or not just walks into a room and starts going to work on a guys fingernails with a pair of pliers? COME ON. Even you in your self-righteous splendor don't believe that. Torture is a last resort which is used when the person with information just will not give it up.

 

From Physicians for Human Rights:

 

Health Consequences of Psychological Torture

 

The PHR report reviews extensive clinical experience and studies that have revealed the destructive health consequences of psychological torture such as memory impairment, severe depression with vegetative symptoms, somatic complaints of headache and back pain, nightmares, feeling of shame and humiliation, and reduced capacity to concentrate. One of the PHR's sources familiar with Guantánamo said that detainees there suffer from incoherent speech, disorientation, delusions, and paranoia.

 

Prolonged Isolation

 

Studies have demonstrated that short-term isolation caused an inability to think or concentrate, anxiety, temporal and spatial disorientation, hallucinations and loss of motor skills. The ICRC, government reports and documentation of individual detainees, who have been subjected to long-term isolation, all substantiate the severe health effects of solitary confinement.

 

Sleep Deprivation

 

Total sleep deprivation can cause impairments in memory, learning and logical reasoning. Sleep restriction can also result in hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Two detainees held in Afghanistan said that several weeks of sleep deprivation left them terrified and disoriented.

 

Sexual Humiliation

 

Victims of sexual torture forever carry a stigma and will often be ostracized by the community. Sexual humiliation often leads to symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), major depression and multiple physical complaints such as headaches, eating disorders and digestive problems. Suicides may also occur unless a strong religious conviction forbids otherwise.

 

And..............I.........COULDNT CARE LESS.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

That's their opinion. Im willing to bet there there quite a few people in the SF and CIA community who would beg to differ.

Do you honestly think that any interrogator whether you classify him as abusive or not just walks into a room and starts going to work on a guys fingernails with a pair of pliers? COME ON. Even you in your self-righteous splendor don't believe that. Torture is a last resort which is used when the person with information just will not give it up.

And..............I.........COULDNT CARE LESS.

Yeah, the CIA who did such wonderful things like Project Phoenix

 

But since you're so intent -- Why not ask some CIA agents?

 

Some perennially high-profile retired CIA officers like Bob Baer, Frank Anderson, and Vincent Cannistraro recently spoke out to Knight Ridder about their opposition to torture on practical grounds (Cannistraro said that detainees will "say virtually anything to end their torment"). But over the past 18 months, several lesser-known former officers have been trying, publicly and privately, to convince both the agency and the public that torture and other unduly coercive questioning tactics are morally wrong as well.

 

Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, for example, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture "because it corrupts the society that tolerates it."

 

This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus's assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, "even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy," represents "a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade" a nation in its own eyes and the world's.

 

"The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society," Gerber says, "is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that's acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for. I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society."

 

The moral dimensions of torture, Gerber adds, are inextricably linked with the practical; aside from the fact that torture almost always fails to yield true or useful information, it has the potential to adversely affect CIA operations.

 

"Foreign nationals agree to spy for us for many different reasons; some do it out of an overwhelming admiration for America and what it stands for, and to those people, I think, America being associated with torture does affect their willingness to work with us," he says. "But one of my arguments with the agency about ethics, particularly in this case, is that it's not about case studies, but philosophy. Aristotle says the ends and means must be in concert; if the ends and means are not in concert, good ends will be corrupted by bad means."

 

A similar stance was articulated last year by Merle L. Pribbenow, a 27-year veteran of the agency's clandestine Directorate of Operations. Writing in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA's in-house journal, Pribbenow recalled that an old college friend had recently expressed his belief that "the terrorist threat to America was so grave that any methods, including torture, should be used to obtain the information we need." The friend was vexed that Pribbenow's former colleagues "had not been able to 'crack' these prisoners."

 

Pribbenow sought an answer by revisiting the arcane case of Nguyen Van Tai, the highest-ranking Vietcong prisoner captured and interrogated by both South Vietnamese and American forces during the Vietnam War.

 

Re-examining in detail the techniques used by the South Vietnamese (protracted torture that included electric shocks; beatings; various forms of water torture; stress positions; food, water, and sleep deprivation) and by the Americans (rapport-building and no violence), Pribbenow reached a stark conclusion: "While the South Vietnamese use of torture did result (eventually) in Tai's admission of his true identity, it did not provide any other usable information," he wrote. In the end, he said, "it was the skillful questions and psychological ploys of the Americans, and not any physical infliction of pain, that produced the only useful (albeit limited) information that Tai ever provided."

 

But perhaps most noteworthy was Pribbenow's conclusion: "This brings me back to my college classmate's question. The answer I gave him -- one in which I firmly believe -- is that we, as Americans, must not let our methods betray our goals," he said.

 

There are limits, however, beyond which we cannot and should not go if we are to continue to call ourselves Americans. America is as much an ideal as a place, and physical torture of the kind used by the Vietnamese (North as well as South) has no place in it."

 

Retired since 1995, Pribbenow spends most of his time writing on Vietnam War history and translating Vietnamese works. With the exception of participating in a documentary series on the Vietnam War, he has never spoken to the press. But last week in an exclusive interview with National Journal, he revealed that part of what prompted him to write his piece was his own experience in Vietnam, where as an interpreter participating in CIA interrogations, he had occasion to interact with South Vietnamese torturers and their victims.

 

"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things.

 

"I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions."

 

Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself."

 

Pribbenow also said he was moved to write down his thoughts out of concern for the current generation of intelligence officers. "I don't personally know of any cases where an agency officer ever [tortured] anyone; that was always taboo, something we just didn't do," he said.

 

"But I had been seeing stuff in the news, on TV, TV commentators, that sort of thing, in favor of torture," he said, "and I thought, 'I know there are a lot of new intelligence officers, new guys who don't have a lot of experience,' and thought maybe something like this will help them make their own decisions as to how to handle themselves in these situations, especially when people in authority are saying things that are unclear."

 

Indeed, Pribbenow, Gerber, and other veterans interviewed all noted that one of their greatest worries is that the proposed exemption to McCain's legislation will institutionalize something that has historically been an exception in CIA culture: CIA officers actually doing physical harm to interrogation suspects.

 

One longtime case officer asks, "Are there instances throughout history when we have known, and in some cases, at least, turned a blind eye to, that allied or friendly intelligence services are torturing people? Yes," he says. "Is it something our own officers have done? Almost never."

 

What has many veterans worried, he said, is the fact that while case officers aren't actually trained in interrogation techniques ("I'm not sure I ever knew anyone who was a 'professional interrogator' in the agency," says Pribbenow), in recent years officers have been getting the worst combination of no training plus ambiguous signals from management on the ethics of interrogation.

 

From 1972 to 1975, Frank Snepp was the CIA's top interrogator in Saigon, where he choreographed elaborate, protracted sessions with Nguyen Van Tai and, at one point, seven other senior Vietcong captives. To the question of whether torture or abusive behavior by interrogators is justified, Snepp's answer is unequivocally no. And the fact that this point isn't understood at the agency today, Snepp says, is a sign of serious problems.

 

"One of the big lessons for the agency was that the South Vietnamese torturing people got in the way of getting information," he says. "One day, without my knowledge, the South Vietnamese forces beat one of my subjects to a pulp, and when he staggered into the interrogation room, I was furious. And I went to the station chief and he said, 'What do you want me to do about it?'

 

"I told him to tell the Vietnamese to lay off, and he said, 'What do you want me to tell them in terms of why?' I said, 'Because it's wrong, it's just wrong.' He laughed and said, 'Look, we've got 180,000 North Vietnamese troops within a half hour of here -- I can't tell them, don't beat the enemy. Give me a pragmatic reason.' I said, 'He can't talk. He's a wreck. I can't interrogate him.' He said, 'That, I can use with them.'

 

"The important lesson for me was that moral arguments don't work," Snepp says. "But if you have pragmatic reasons, that will work. But the most important thing is that the only time you can be sure that what you're getting from someone is valid is through discourse. In Tai's case, the idea was to develop absolute trust, which you do not do by alienating and humiliating someone. He liked poetry; I brought him books of poetry, and in many sessions we sat and discussed poetry, nothing else.

 

The most extreme thing I did was a disorientation technique, where I would keep jumping from one subject to another so rapidly that he might not remember what he'd told me the day before, or not remember that he had not, in fact, told me what I was saying he'd told me. Little by little, I drew him into revelations. And I was highly commended for this work."

 

But today, according to case officers, younger CIA operatives have no formal training. No qualified old hands are around to informally mentor them, or to even swap collegial notes, on the practical or the ethical in interrogations.

 

"We're not trained interrogators -- to be honest, in those situations I really had no idea what I'm doing, and I'm not the only one who has had this experience," says a decorated active case officer with nearly 25 years of experience, who on several occasions in recent years has participated in interrogations of Islamist radicals conducted by foreign intelligence services.

 

"The larger problem here, I think, is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn't work.... I'm worried that this is becoming more institutionalized," the officer says. "There are other officers I know who I think are coming to take on faith that the only way to get anything out of a suspected terrorist is beating it out of him, because he's in an entirely different category, so fanatical that it's the only thing that'll work."

 

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the "gloves-off" approach works -- but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn't be emulated today.

 

"I have been privy to some of what's going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, 'The agency deserves every bad thing that's going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'" he said. "In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon -- technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations," he said.

 

"I don't know how much violence was used -- it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

 

"But here's the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn't. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that's never been settled, one that crops up and goes away -- do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

 

"I think as late as a decade ago, there were enough of us around who had enough experience to constitute the majority view, which was that this was simply not the way we did business, and for good reasons of practicality or morality. It's not just about what it does or doesn't do, but about who, and where, we as a country want to be."

 

--

And torture hasn't been a last resort. It's been a modus operandi for MI (perhaps you should read the Taguba Report from Gen. Taguba)

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Once again..............for the 1987823423412341th time. Some are for it and some are against it. That's what Ive been saying all along and will continue to keep saying. I never recall saying that torture is universally applied or approved of in the military and intelligence communities.

Edited June 29, 2006 by NUKE_CLEVELAND

[NorthSideSox72]

Points like that shouldn't need to be voiced but I guess they have to be around here.

Since the President himself did the exact same thing, I guess he isn't aware either. Better write him a letter.

 

While you are at it, tell him to stop desecrating American flags.

[minors]

Once again..............for the 1987823423412341th time. Some are for it and some are against it. That's what Ive been saying all along and will continue to keep saying. I never recall saying that torture is universally applied or approved of in the military and intelligence communities.

 

 

You never said it was applied or approved by everyone. This torture stuff has been taken way overboard.

[WCSox]

Since the President himself did the exact same thing, I guess he isn't aware either. Better write him a letter.

 

The President undermined the authority of his own administration by leaking classified information to a reporter and then published it on the front page of three of the most popular newspapers in the nation? That's news to me.

 

Bush didn't do "the exact same thing." He spoke in GENERALIZATIONS. The Times (and the two others) printed DETAILS.

Edited June 29, 2006 by WCSox

[NorthSideSox72]

The President undermined the authority of his own administration by leaking classified information to a reporter and then published it on the front page of three of the most popular newspapers in the nation? That's news to me.

 

Bush didn't do "the exact same thing." He spoke in GENERALIZATIONS. The Times (and the two others) printed DETAILS.

I see no specifics in the articles of any material consequence, just like there were none in Bush's statements, and the proud proclamations all over US government websites. Just the one thing - we are watching your financial transactions.

 

Therefore, same thing.

 

I have nothing more to add here.

[WCSox]

I see no specifics in the articles of any material consequence, just like there were none in Bush's statements, and the proud proclamations all over US government websites. Just the one thing - we are watching your financial transactions.

 

Therefore, same thing.

 

If it were the "same thing", the NYT obviously wouldn't have had to go through the trouble of obtaining the information from a government informant. They could've simply re-hashed Bush's words. And if the news was already several years old, it wasn't "new" by any means and wouldn't have made it onto the NYT's cover.

 

So, no, it isn't the same thing. It was classified for a reason.

[Rex Kickass]

I'm sorry what were the details... like the name of the organization which was referenced in a 2002 US report to the UN? The debate over the program's legality? Or the fact that the New York Times, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal all reported that a specific program exists, rather than a reporting a generalization that a specific program exists?

[Cknolls]

A little more background on this from the Journal.

 

 

 

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110008585

[Rex Kickass]

So now, I'm really confused. The New York Times goes to press regarding a story the government wants them to keep under wraps. After two months, the New York Times says - we're going to print this anyway because the public has a right to know. Then the government releases the same information to the Wall Street Journal and declassifies the information that was released in the first place.

 

Why does it make a difference that the New York Times released information that was recently declassified, when its the same information the Wall Street Journal received after it was declassified?

 

The stories seem similar - to the point that certain people in this board couldn't remember if they had read the WSJ or the NYT story. So again, if they gave the story to another paper, why is it a problem that the NYT also printed essentially the same story?

[kapkomet]

So now, I'm really confused. The New York Times goes to press regarding a story the government wants them to keep under wraps. After two months, the New York Times says - we're going to print this anyway because the public has a right to know. Then the government releases the same information to the Wall Street Journal and declassifies the information that was released in the first place.

 

Why does it make a difference that the New York Times released information that was recently declassified, when its the same information the Wall Street Journal received after it was declassified?

 

The stories seem similar - to the point that certain people in this board couldn't remember if they had read the WSJ or the NYT story. So again, if they gave the story to another paper, why is it a problem that the NYT also printed essentially the same story?

Because it was going to print and they knew it. So at that point, they might as well declassify it. That was my entire point about the NYS having it FIRST.

[Rex Kickass]

OK, well - it was a matter of time til someone went to print with it. By the WSJ's own admission, they too had been investigating SWIFT programs. And again, what exactly was so actionable about this?

[kapkomet]

The biggest harm, imo, is that they disclosed who all is in on the program, and that's where they should have stopped.

[EvilMonkey]

The biggest harm, imo, is that they disclosed who all is in on the program, and that's where they should have stopped.

YES! Because now all the people who cooperated with us on this will think twice about doing so again because they were 'outed'. The finance guy in Canada is getting a ton of heat from all the moonbat liberals up there for not saying anything about a LEGAL program. The SWIFT people now fear that they could be a terrorist target since their existence was made common knowledge. The government there is also demanding investigation.

 

When topics like this come up, you have the liberals generally saying that if we 'go after the informants' that it would create a climate where confidential sources wouldn't want to come forward. I think I heard the phrase 'it would have a chilling effect on our free speech rights'. You get the same effect by blabbign to the world about who helps us. If they help us, they are a target. How many people knoew of the SWIFt thing before this broke? Not many. How many knew that Canada was helping us get this info? Probably only a few. But next time we need help, I bet the governments 'confidential sources' will think twice about their safety before talking.

[kapkomet]

BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

This from June 30, 2006 Wall Street Journal. Bold my emphasis.

 

 

Fit and Unfit to Print

June 30, 2006; Page A12

 

'Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest."

 

So wrote the great legal scholar, Alexander Bickel, about the duties of the press in his 1975 collection of essays "The Morality of Consent." We like to re-read Bickel to get our Constitutional bearings, and he's been especially useful since the New York Times decided last week to expose a major weapon in the U.S. arsenal against terror financing.

 

President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public's right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper's obligations during wartime.

 

* * *

We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury's antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these columns had no say in the decision to publish. We have reported the story ourselves, however, and the facts are that the Times's decision was notably different from the Journal's.

 

According to Tony Fratto, Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.

 

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

 

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed "they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong." So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

 

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

* * *

We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip. On the left, the motive is to help shield the Times from political criticism. On the right, the goal is to tar everyone in the "mainstream media." But anyone who understands how publishing decisions are made knows that different newspapers make up their minds differently.

 

Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized.

 

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not. Mr. Keller's argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

 

Just as dubious is the defense in a Times editorial this week that "The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals." In this asymmetric war against terrorists, intelligence and financial tracking are the equivalent of troop movements. They are America's main weapons.

 

The Times itself said as much in a typically hectoring September 24, 2001, editorial "Finances of Terror": "Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities." Isn't the latter precisely what the Swift operation is?

Whether the Journal News department would agree with us in this or other cases, we can't say. We do know, however, that Journal editors have withheld stories at the government's request in the past, notably during the Gulf War when they learned that a European company that had sold defense equipment to Iraq was secretly helping the Pentagon. Readers have to decide for themselves, based on our day-to-day work, whether they think Journal editors are making the correct publishing judgments.

 

* * *

Which brings us back to the New York Times. We suspect that the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters.

 

As Alexander Bickel wrote, the relationship between government and the press in the free society is an inevitable and essential contest. The government needs a certain amount of secrecy to function, especially on national security, and the press in its watchdog role tries to discover what it can. The government can't expect total secrecy, Bickel writes, "but the game similarly calls on the press to consider the responsibilities that its position implies. Not everything is fit to print." The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public's right to know?

 

The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.

 

So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on "leaks," deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency's al Qaeda wiretaps.

 

Mr. Keller's open letter explaining his decision to expose the Treasury program all but admits that he did so because he doesn't agree with, or believe, the Bush Administration. "Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress," he writes, and "some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight." Since the Treasury story broke, as it happens, no one but Congressman Ed Markey and a few cranks have even objected to the program, much less claimed illegality.

 

Perhaps Mr. Keller has been listening to his boss, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in a recent commencement address apologized to the graduates because his generation "had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

 

"Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way," the publisher continued. "You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights," and so on. Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.

 

* * *

In all of this, Mr. Sulzberger and the Times are reminiscent of a publisher from an earlier era, Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. In the 1930s and into World War II, the Tribune was implacable in its opposition to FDR and his conduct of the war. During the war itself, his newspaper also exposed secrets, including one story after the victory at Midway in 1942 that essentially disclosed that the U.S. had broken Japanese codes. The government considered, but decided against, prosecuting McCormick's paper under the Espionage Act of 1917.

 

That was a wise decision, and not only because it would have drawn more attention to the Tribune "scoop." Once a government starts indicting reporters for publishing stories, there will be no drawing any lines against such prosecutions, and we will be well down the road to an Official Secrets Act that will let government dictate coverage.

 

The current political clamor is nonetheless a warning to the press about the path the Times is walking. Already, its partisan demand for a special counsel in the Plame case has led to a reporter going to jail and to defeats in court over protecting sources. Now the politicians are talking about Espionage Act prosecutions. All of which is cause for the rest of us in the media to recognize, heeding Alexander Bickel, that sometimes all the news is not fit to print.

 

The SECOND bolded part is the key, to me. THAT is what I was talking about two posts above. And the THIRD bolded part is exactly why the NYT is a bunch of hypocritical assbags.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

WSJ >>> NYT

 

 

Ownage to the Nth degree there.

[Rex Kickass]

BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

This from June 30, 2006 Wall Street Journal. Bold my emphasis.

The SECOND bolded part is the key, to me. THAT is what I was talking about two posts above. And the THIRD bolded part is exactly why the NYT is a bunch of hypocritical assbags.

 

Is that why a New York Times columnist spent months in jail for not revealing her sources regarding the Valerie Plame leaks? I fail to see the hypocrasy. Comparing this to Valerie Plame is apples and anvils.

 

This article has little to do with individual persons, or even step by step details of a program. It mentions a company that the US has a partnership with. Something that has been publicly mentioned as early as 2002 by the US government in reports to the United Nations.

 

The other column specifically blew the cover of an undercover CIA agent, putting her specific life at risk as well as the entire organization at risk as well. The undercover CIA agent was working on WMD program intel within Iran. Further, the issue wasn't about what Bob Novak wrote, but rather that a government official would leak identities of covert agents for political gain. If the NYT was really being hypocritical, it would have turned over the notes of the same story that Novak broke which the Times sat on. If you recall, Judith Miller spent a couple months in jail for refusing to reveal her source - which turned out to be Scooter Libby. And the Times backed her up on it. So they chose to protect the administration on the Valerie Plame leak after all. Maybe this issue isn't as cut and dry as you see it?

 

If we're at war, which one is worse? Revealing the name of a company that works with the government and acts as a message service with thousands of financial institutions? Or revealing the identity of a covert government agent working on WMD proliferation issues when one of the main challenges we were fighting at the time were supposedly WMD proliferation issues?

 

The administration's reaction is clearly manufactured outrage. So is yours. If the White House really gave a crap about this story, the NYT and LAT who were both asked to sit on the story and both decided against sitting on the story would have access curtailed. But both were asked to cover the state dinner between the Japanese head of state and the President. It seems all is forgiven between the President and the newspapers. Maybe, its because the newspapers were actually just doing their job after all.

[kapkomet]

Access curtailed? It was LEAKED by someone inside the government who has a vendetta to hamper BushCo.'s war effort.

 

As far as the Plame issue, it is CERTAINLY hypocritical. They threw their own in jail to get who the 'source' was because they thought it was going to bring down Karl Rove. They wanted it so bad, they could taste it. Sources be damned, get it all out there. This time? We have to protect the American people's right to know by protecting the information and where it came from. RIIIIIIIGHT.

[Rex Kickass]

Kap, the source was Scooter Libby and it made it able to finger Karl Rove by revealing the source. If bringing down Rove was their only purpose, why wouldnt the NYT have just turned over the files?