At this moment in time and in the immediate future, I am more afraid of what my own government might be able and willing to do than what any external threat might.
You do realize that it is a crime to give classified information to someone that doesn't have the proper security clearance, right? It isn't just a suggestion when something is labeled TOP SECRET, it actually means that there are consequences for disseiminating that information. So, you think enforcing the law is disgusting and UnAmerican?
From my perspective the government is using security clearences as a way to mask their complicity in illegal acts. The inital and IMHO ultimate expression of the American spirit was the Boston Tea Party, a direct rejection of repressive and punative government masked under the guise of the law. Taking your argument, the Nuremburg Laws codified the persicution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Would it have been "UnAmerican" to oppose similar laws if they had been enacted in the U.S.? Was it "UnAmerican" for Rosa Parks to violate the law and not give up her seat to a white passenger?
As someone who's been in government for years and held clearances, your revelations about consequences are news to me. Thanks for the heads up. I think this Administration long ago forfeited the benefit of the doubt. I think it would be quite easy for them to come up with an illegal program and classify it so nobody could raise questions. Classification of information has certainly been used in the past to try and cover up government malfeasance. I see the same thing happening here, especially the phone call issue. By defending the administration in these cases, people are arguing that the administration, any administration, has the supreme right to decide what is in the national interest, what is legal, and what should be classified. As Potter Stewart said in the Pentagon Papers case... (Here's some news... the credibility of this administration is shot.) A lower court judge who sided with the NYTimes in the case put it this way, which still rings true today... Speaking of the Pentagon Papers, Here's Haldeman on one of the Nixon tapes talking about the damage the relased papers will cause... I suspect this is why such a big deal is being made of this disclosure. And if you have any reading comprehension abilities at all, you know what I find disgusting is not the enforcement of laws, but the corruption of laws and the labeling of Americans as traitors or terrorists.
I see from Froomkin that according to Tony Snow, the real damage done by the NYTimes story is that it tipped terorists off to the existence of SWIFT... http://www.swift.com/
That is hilarious. But to be fair to Snow a lot of people probably didn't go to SWIFT.com. I got so much spam from them, that I blocked all their IP's.
Having done several thousand dollars of wire transfers to Europe in the past year, I can definatively state that it is impossible to do a wire transfer without knowledge at least that there is something called SWIFT that exists. Whenever you do a wire transfer from the US you have to use a SWIFT number in order to route the funds to the correct bank. The transfer documents have a blank labled "SWIFT/BIC number" that you have to fill out to complete the transaction. Do a google on IBAN, BIC and SWIFT if you doubt.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008585 -- Fit and Unfit to Print What are the obligations of the press in wartime? Friday, June 30, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT "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.
Are you and this editorial writer going to pretend that the information was still secret? Just because you didn't visit the public website of SWIFT, or subscribe to their magazine which was available to the public doesn't mean it was a secret. It is beyond abusrd that the program can have its own website and magazine talking about its activities but for some reason it is dangerous when the NYTIMES prints it. To still pretend like the Times did anything wrong in this case, is humiliating.
More BS from the Administration and the GOP Congress. It's the whole Saddam/Mushroom Cloud thing again, wearing a different dress. Have bankrupt policies, terrible poll numbers? Come out with a false assault on our security and blame it on a strawman. Attack and attempt to intimidate those who speak reality and truth. Keep D&D Civil.
I agree, but I just can't believe that after all that has come out about the lack of secrecy involved in this that anyone would still pretend like it was a secret that we shouldn't know about. It is laughable that people would still try this tact when all they had to do even before the Times published the story was to go to www.Swift.com and the very group that monitors the program was talking about it. They even had their own magazine that anyone at all could subscribe to, and read all about them. But for some reason they can make themselves public, but for the Times to do it is a dangerous thing? It is just so transparent.
This looked like a good thread to post this column in. It's a good read, and certainly brought back some memories: COMMENTARY Meyerson: Republicans take a page from the Nixon playbook Harold Meyerson, THE WASHINGTON POST Thursday, July 06, 2006 Let's give credit where credit is due: Nobody knows how to take the worst political hand imaginable — responsibility for a failing war — and turn it to their own advantage like the Republicans. That was the defining political accomplishment of Richard Nixon in Vietnam. It may yet be the defining political achievement of George W. Bush in Iraq. Nixon, of course, had an easier time of it. When he took office in 1969, he inherited a war that his Democratic predecessors had made and that had long since descended into a blood-drenched, stalemated disaster. He could have opted to end the war early in his term, particularly because neither he nor his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed it was winnable. But by continuing the conflict, and even expanding it into Cambodia, he enraged the 40 percent of the nation that wanted us out of Vietnam. Millions of demonstrators took to the streets; some in the student movement embraced a wacky, self-marginalizing anti-Americanism; and mainstream Democrats grew steadily more antiwar. By nurturing such deep divisions in the body politic, Nixon created the very kind of political landscape on which he was a master at maneuvering. Just 10 months into his presidency, Nixon was championing what he termed the "silent majority" of his countrymen against the protesting hordes. Democrats railed against the war in Vietnam; Nixon railed against the demonstrators and Democrats, whom he gleefully conflated, at home. It was an asymmetric conflict, and Nixon won it, defeating George McGovern in 1972 by more than 20 percentage points. Today, Republicans in general and Karl Rove in particular have resurrected the Nixon game plan. They are not mounting a point-by-point defense of the administration's plan for Iraq, not least because the administration doesn't really have a plan for Iraq. When Senate Democrats brought two resolutions to the floor recently, each calling for a change in our policy, the Republicans defeated them both, but they pointedly failed to introduce a resolution of their own affirming the administration's conduct of the war. That, they understood, would have been a loser in the court of public opinion. Instead, they walked a tightrope: not really defending the war per se but attacking the Democrats for seeking to end it. This was Nixonism of the highest order. But Bush Republicans face a tougher challenge than their Nixonian forebears. There aren't really demonstrators in the streets. No one is being rude or disorderly. Most congressional Democrats advocate nothing more than a phased redeployment of our troops, though polling shows the public is split on the more radical alternative of setting a hard deadline for withdrawal. In the face of such raging moderation, the Republicans have nonetheless opened a two-pronged attack on the Democrats. First, they argue, the Dems are defeatists, calling for a withdrawal of our forces that would dishonor the men and women in the military who've given their lives in the course of the war. But the selectivity with which Republicans invoke this equation of withdrawal with dishonor undermines the equation altogether. After all, who among them argues that Ronald Reagan's withdrawal of our forces from Lebanon, or Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam, disgraced our dead? The more serious, and innovative, Republican claim isn't that Democrats are defeatists, however; it's that the Democrats are ditherers. "I believe [the Democrats'] real challenge is that they have no common unified position on Iraq as a party," Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole said recently. "Whether we are right or wrong on our side of the aisle, we do have a common position." Repeatedly, Republicans have accused the Democrats of having what the president termed an "interesting internal debate" on the war. The implication is that the Democrats are all talk (or, worse, all thought) but no action, and in a post-Sept. 11 world, what really matters is resolve. That the president's war of choice has created a disaster in Iraq so profound that no course of action is likely to result in a safe, livable nation, then, may perversely work in the president's favor. Of course, the Democrats are conflicted about what to do in Iraq. They think about it (at least, some of them do) and can't totally agree on how best to mitigate the catastrophe. The Democrats think too much, say the Republicans; such people are dangerous. Vote for us; we're dumb but tough. This may not be a surefire prescription for electoral success, but given the hole the Republicans have dug themselves into, I think Nixon would be proud. http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/07/6meyerson_edit.html Pretty thought provoking. The GOP strategy is no mystery, when you delve into it, and the comparison to Nixon and Vietnam, in my opinion, is dead on. Keep D&D Civil.
