Quagmire for cons on NY Times article

[George Gervin's Afro]

September 23, 2001

" We are putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice, we will work with their governments, ask them to freeze or block terrorists' ability to access funds in foreign accounts. If they fail to help us by sharing information or freezing accounts , the Dept of Treasury now has the authority to freeze their bank's assets and transactions in the United States"..

GW Bush


Didn't Dick '5 deferrment 'Cheney call the leak disgraceful?

Peter king(R) of NY call for the leaker and the paper to be brought up on charges of treason? The selective outrage from the mindless ones everwhere was deafening..but starngely silent when dumbya told the world what we were going to do... this is why I hate the GOP and I stomach the democrats

[Cant_Be_Faded]

you're anti american

[ChumpDumper]

http://www.tshizzle.com/tshirts/Funny/fguyallright-large.jpg

[xrayzebra]

you're anti american


No he is just plain stupid. But what the hey......no problem for a
dimm-o-crap. :spin

[George Gervin's Afro]

[QUOTE=xrayzebra]No he is just plain stupid. But what the hey......no problem for a
dimm-o-crap. :spin[/QUOTE

I noticed no try at refuting the quote or the hypicrisy? You kool aid drinkers sure are selective with your outrage. What's even funnier is the King was asked (not by Fox News) about the WSJ leaking the case as well..His response "Times did it first"..the new york times is great red meat for the righties.. nothing like gay marriage and the NY Times to get the base fired up..

[fyatuk]

I noticed no try at refuting the quote or the hypicrisy? You kool aid drinkers sure are selective with your outrage. What's even funnier is the King was asked (not by Fox News) about the WSJ leaking the case as well..His response "Times did it first"..the new york times is great red meat for the righties.. nothing like gay marriage and the NY Times to get the base fired up..

Well, other than the fact that there's a big difference in mentioning the broad strokes of a potential strategy and giving specific details about a current covert op, it's completely inexescusable...

Personally I believe the NYT should be forced to reveal their source. The source's security clearance should be revoked, and then the matter should be dropped.

[Nbadan]

Selective outrage indeed:


The “Times” is the biggest leaker of sensitive government secrets, but it is not the New York Times. It isn’t even close. It is the oracle of the American right, the Washington Times, that holds that title. Over the course of the past two decades, the Washington Times and its Pentagon reporter, Bill Gertz, have regularly told the world some of the nation’s most highly guarded and sensitive secrets.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported several years ago on the testimony of a senior official of the National Security Agency before the House Intelligence Committee. The committee was told that media leaking is:

A problem of monumental proportions and has caused . . . grave damage . . . the loss of SIGINT access to information of extreme importance to U.S. national security.

According to Ignatius, National Security Agency data identified 40 instances in 1998 and 34 instances in the first six months of 1999 when its signals intelligence capabilities were disclosed for the first time in the media. The NSA told Ignatius that Gertz personally accounted for many of these leaks. The most famous security breach by the Washington Times did not involve Gertz but another reporter. It was the Aug. 21, 1998, disclosure that the U.S. was monitoring Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone conversations. Shortly thereafter bin Laden stopped using the phone, and the quality of U.S. intelligence on al Qaeda took a precipitous nosedive.

Gertz defended himself and the Washington Times in a 2001 interview on National Public Radio:

From our standpoint as a news organization, if information comes our way and we were to withhold it, there is always the possibility that that information would come out in another news organization. So that's what we take into account when we look at these issues… We report the news, and if that contains classified information, that's part of my job. Most of the information I get doesn't come with a stamp on it that says secret or top secret so it would be very hard to tell what's classified today. In fact the maxim is: if you classify everything, then nothing is classified.

None of these leaks has sparked an outcry from the pseudo patriots who are now so exercised over the conduct of their philosophical adversaries at the New York Times. Clearly the recent New York Times disclosures were far less damaging than any one of a long list of revelations published by the Washington Times. Terrorists have never relied heavily on the formal banking system, and the effectiveness of the program reported by the New York Times has clearly reduced that reliance even further. Nearly all recent terrorist plots, including those in London and Toronto, have been organized and financed locally.

Right wing critics of the New York Times were also missing in action during the outrageous betrayal of the U.S. and its intelligence capabilities by Iraq’s former deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi — a betrayal that was fostered by the Pentagon darlings of the right, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. After being told by a member of the Wolfowitz-Feith team that the U.S. had broken the Iranian diplomatic code, Chalabi returned to Baghdad and reported that fact to the Iranians. No one at the Pentagon was ever held responsible, and no one that I know of involved in the jihad against the New York Times has ever asked why.

There is also apparently no one in this group who has demanded accountability for the deliberate disclosure by the White House of an undercover CIA agent — destroying not only her career but putting at risk human assets she may have interacted with in various countries around the world.

Whether this gang of opinion molders deserves the mantel of patriotism that they are so fond of displaying can be easily determined by their level of desire to rout all leakers of sensitive government secrets, not just the ones who happen at the moment to be between them and continued political power. Patriots — even weak ones — put their country first and their partisan interests second.

American Progress (http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1824019)