The Discerning Texan

HH: I've always thought we were going to win this war, and I've always thought we'd summon the political will to do it. But today's Supreme Court decision, coupled with the House of Representatives' refusal to name names in their resolution condemning the action of the New York Times, and the similar reasoning coming out of the United States Senate leaves me wondering. To discuss that and other things, Mark Steyn joins me, columnist to the world. You can read his stuff at Steynonline.com. Mark, let's start with the United States Supreme Court. Your reaction to the Hamdan decision?

MS: Well, I agree with you. I think it's a bad decision, and I think it's part of the same story as the New York Times story, that on the battlefield, the military is only one of the weapons you deploy when you're at war. And on all the other fields, like the media, the courts, the broader culture, we are not performing well. And this is a very good decision for every jihadist who now knows that he has...basically, he will be treated like a U.S. citizen if he falls into the hands of the U.S. military. Meanwhile, if the U.S. military fall into their hands, they get their heads cut off and left by the roadside.

HH: Mark Steyn, it seems to me, and I was trying to describe this earlier today. We have a 9/11 President, and a 9/11 military, and a 9/11 cabinet, and there are some members of Congress who are 9/11 Congressmen and Senators. But we've got a 9/10 Court majority, and we've got a 9/10 Senate and House leadership, it appears, and certainly a 9/10 Democratic Party. What's it going to take?

MS: Well, you know, you said you thought that we would in the end win this war. I think it is entirely possible that we could lose, simply because at the heart of all these things is the idea that somehow, you demonstrate your moral virture by bending over backwards to be as accommodating as you can at people who want to kill you. And that is generally not a good idea. I don't like Vladimir Putin, but when he reacted to this business with the four Russian hostages by saying that he was dispatching Special Forces on a mission to hunt down and kill the guys who did it, I did...I was very heartened at a guy who just actually sees it that clearly. I mean, we complain a lot of the time about the unassimilated Muslim population. But in fact, when it comes to things like this, our enemy are incredibly assimilated. They understand the legalisms very well. They understand how to play the court systems, how to play the media extremely well.

HH: Mark Steyn, let's turn to the New York Times/Los Angeles Times story of a week ago tomorrow. We haven't talked since that came out. What was your reaction to it?

MS: Well, I think it's disgusting. I personally stopped buying...I stopped writing for the Times, I think about eight or nine years ago, and they edited a piece I wrote into the biggest mush ever to appear under my name. So I stopped writing for it. And a couple of years later, I realized that actually, quite a lot of the paper reads like mush, so I stopped buying it. So I'm not in a position, personally, to boycott the paper. But if I could do, I would, because I think it crossed the line into Al Jazeera territory with what it did for no good reason. And it could have done the same with any of the secret codes that were used, in which the Allies relied on in the Second World War. And if you think of...this is the difference in the media across 60 years. In the Second World War, the BBC cooperated with the British government in broadcasting coded messages to members of the French resistence on the Continent. Now, not only couldn't you get any of these guys to do anything like that, but if they found out that somebody else was doing it, they'd expose the program.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, after the outrage began to mount, the New York Times has adopted a line that says no harm, no foul. That which we published did not in fact assist the terrorists. I've been arguing that of course it assists terrorists in eluding capture. What's your sense of it?

MS: Yes, I think there's absolutely no doubt that it does. I mean, there were no issues here that impacted in any legal or Constitutional sense. If a guy wires money from a bank account in the United Arab Emirates to a bank account in Paris via a clearing house in Belgium, that's got nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution, or any legal issues. They did this, basically, just to expose the program, and to damage it. And the idea that somehow they're exercising their freedom as the founders foresaw it...I mean, I'm sure you get this everywhere you go, Hugh. The American people do not think the press are a privileged class. They think we've all got freedom of expression, whether you're a newspaperman, or you're a plumber, or you've got a small software company, or you're a clerk at the feed store. But they don't think that the New York Times has privileges above and beyond what any of the rest of us have.

HH: And they also believe, and I think intuitively, but backed up by sound reasoning, that if you print a story that says Hambali was obtained...his capture was obtained by the SWIFT program, that everyone who knew Hambali is going to go back and reverse engineer that, and figure out what he did, and then not do it again. And they also assume that a lot of terrorists are just plain stupid, and didn't know about financial tracking, much less brilliant, and knowing about SWIFT. I find it astonishing that they think that this argument will work, Mark Steyn, that no one has been advantaged by this.

MS: Yeah, no. And the problem is, a lot of the big banks use this SWIFT program in Belgium. My bank in Montreal uses it. But the people will now be actively thinking, particularly some Saudi banks, wealthy banks in the Gulf and others, will be thinking of setting up systems that will bypass this, specifically in order to attract jihad business, which can be quite lucrative. And I think it's very foolish to actually advertise that you're willing to be played for suckers, which is what it looks like we do a lot of the time.

HH: Which is why Belgium and Canada have already made noises of withdrawing cooperation with us, vis-à-vis the SWIFT program.

MS: Absolutely, because this is not...this is simply not just something that damages you with some crazy guy in the caves in Pakistan, or in Afghanistan. It's something that tells other advanced Western nations that America is not serious. This is the most damaging thing of all these things. It's not a question of America's enemies. It's not only a question of what the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Russians or the Chinese think. When you talk to high up government officials in friendly countries to America, countries like India, Singapore, Denmark, countries that essentially share the same view of the Islamist threat, they worry about whether America is the strong horse you want to bet on in this game.

HH: Mark Steyn, I discussed this at length with Howard Kurtz and Eric Lichtblau, and Eugene Robinson, and Geneva, the former ombudsman of the Post this Sunday on Reliable Sources. That's their idea of a fair fight. Four MSM'ers and me.

MS: (laughing) You can take them all, Hugh.

HH: It's already over. Yeah, it's done, and I did. But the point is, I was looking for help from the United States Congress. I was hoping the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States would pass resolutions condemning the actions of these two newspapers. Others followed that had not been requested not to publish like the Wall Street Journal. But the Times and the Times are the two Times that did it. And the House won't name names, and I received a call this morning from a Senator staffer, who said the Senate at that point was also not going to name a name, and not comdemn it. It seems to me like they are afraid of the big dogs, so they're going to kick the puppies. What do you think?

MS: Yeah, and I think that speaks very poorly for them. You know, I love those fellows in Washington. They get a bit upset because they think they won't be invited to this or that dinner party when they're next in New York, or the Washington Post crowd will be annoyed with them. But you've got to face down these things. This arrogant man who's basically appointed himself essentially the national security general, this man at the New York Times, he hasn't gone through any confirmation hearings. He basically says I've got a special clause in the U.S. Constitution, just for me and my institution. And the Senate should be calling him on that, and so should the House of Representatives.

HH: You're referring to Bill Keller. Now I get to something I talked about with a lot of people this week. I want your opinion on this. You've been in journalism for how many years, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, actually, pretty much since I was 17 or 18. I was always hoping something else would turn up, but it never did. It's a long time.

HH: Well, I've only been doing it for 17 years. But before that, I spent 6 years in the government, and I've handled a lot of classified information, and I am confident when I say that 95% of America's journalists don't have a clue about intelligence, and how it works. And they are not in a position to judge the impact of these stories, because they don't get out much. They live in little bubbles, and they're not that well educated to begin with, and they're not very good thinkers. Correct me if I'm wrong.

MS: Well, I would agree with you. I think America has one of the most parochial journalist classes in the world, because those of us who come from smaller, less important countries, one consequence of that is if you go to London, there's lots of Australians working in the newsroom. If you go to India, you'll find a lot of British journalists working there. American journalists seem to have this completely parochial idea...I mean, if you look at Bill Keller's choice of words, that it's the administration...he regards this as a program of the administration. It's not. It's a program of the United States government. But he thinks that Bush and Cheney are at war. Not that America is at war, but that Bush and Cheney are. And this is this parochial, almost totally self-absorbed way of looking at what is actually one of the great global conflicts of the age.

HH: 30 seconds, Mark Steyn. What's a terrorist watching this past week conclude about America?

MS: Well, I think when we listen to terrorists talking about the new caliphate, and there are a bunch of guys sitting in the cave, we think they're nuts. When a guy is sitting in the cave listening to Bill Keller explain proudly why he betrayed America's national security interests, that guy in the cave would rightly conclude that we're the ones that are nuts. And it's hard to disagree with him.

HH: Mark Steyn, thank you. Steynonline.com, America.