The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Leak Updates Aplenty
A letter from the various deans of American journalism schools, published in the "Outlook" section of Sunday's Washington Post, neatly illustrates some of the false antitheses. Making a strong case for the right of disclosure and the pitfalls of prior restraint, the signatories nonetheless feel obliged to stipulate an instance where "national security" should have trumped the initial disclosure itself. Can you guess the example they used? It was obviously wrong, they say, for Robert Novak to have revealed the identity of Valerie Plame!
This is both ridiculous and suicidal. It appears to admit that there is a case for self-muzzling by the media but only in a case where the nation's security was not endangered. A serious controversy persists as to whether Joseph Wilson himself endangered national security by repeatedly misstating the facts about the Iraq-Niger connection. In order for that controversy to be fully ventilated, the extent of his connection to the CIA must be fully known. Whether Novak meant to blow Plame's cover or not (and as it happens it seems that he did not), he would have been well within his journalistic rights to do so. Our enemies would have acquired no advantage from the information, and the readers of the press would have been better informed on a major question. The CIA's attempt to criminalize the information was itself part of an interdepartmental war within the administration, which it is the right of every citizen to know about.
And on that point, a New York Times journalist really did go to jail. Some of the paper's columnists now throw out a big chest about the hatred and threats that their editor is enduring, but it is very unlikely indeed that Keller will be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. Judy Miller went to the joint on the elementary matter of protecting a source and was "let go" by the Times shortly after her release. And if you want to talk about hate mail, you should see the deranged way in which liberals and anti-warriors have been accusing her of invading Iraq all on her own. In other words, it's too late for Frank Rich to pretend that this is Spiro Agnew versus the Pentagon Papers. His newspaper has begun the argument at least one rung down from the brave old days, because it has already endorsed a special-prosecutor official-secrecy witch hunt on a trivial question. This makes it harder to look like Elijah Lovejoy.Next up is Stephen Spruiell at NRO's Media Blog, whose comments on the Robert Novak revelations sums Plamegate up quite nicely:
Novak's Revelation...
- Some administration guy (probably Richard Armitage), whom Novak describes as "not a political gunslinger," told Novak "inadvertant[ly]" that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and probably recommended him for his trip to Africa;
- Novak confirmed the information with Karl Rove and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, although the particulars of these convos remain a matter of dispute;
- Novak looked up Joe Wilson in "Who's Who in America" and discovered the name of his super-secret agent wife: Valerie Plame;
- Thus fatally undermining fevered accusations that the White House plotted to "out" Plame as a matter of retaliation for Wilson's op-ed about his tea party in Niger.
Nope, Stephen, you did not. But meanwhile while Special Prosecutors are spending millions chasing around some Democrats' wet dream, real damage is being done. Just ask Hugh Hewitt:
Bill Keller, leader of the New York Times, asserted in a Sunday letter to his readers, that “A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way.”
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Snow, who had met with Keller, fired back in a letter, that “Your charge that our efforts to convince The New York Times not to publish were "half-hearted" is incorrect and offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In other words, Snow branded Keller a liar, as only lies are that far from the truth.
The Los Angeles Times’ Dean Baquet also published an apologia, but one that was flatly contradicted in many aspects by the interview McManus had given to me.
The picture that has emerged after a week is of two for-profit newspapers, eager for Pulitizers and aware of the other’s hunt for a headline, disregarding the urgent arguments of senior government officials and running a story on a program only dimly if at all understood by some (and by no stretch of the imagination all) terrorists, the result of which is to alert the world and even the below-average-intelligence killer of one key way the United States tracks them.
The Indonesian master terrorist Hambali was captured through the SWIFT program. He was apprehended in August of 2003, months after a general commitment to following the money was announced and even some obscure references to SWIFT had made their way into print, proving that even if you know the city is looking for speeders, it doesn’t mean every scofflaw knows where the speed traps and cameras are located.
The impossibility of these career scribblers really comprehending what damage they were doing is obvious, and it leads us to the error that has propelled the Times Two over the cliff: False pride.
These teams of journalists have somehow persuaded themselves that their undergraduate educations and their frequent flyer balances have transformed them into wise and learned assayers of truth. How laughable. None has ever held a security clearance. Publicly available bios assure us that Keller, Baquet, McManus et al are simple products of a closed culture of liberal newsrooms, where travel is presumed to bring knowledge and reporting understanding.
The biggest fraud in this story is the suggestion that Keller et al actually understand counterterrorism, the terror network, and the operation of SWIFT. The casual acknowledgment by McManus that assistance to the terrorists via publication was “conceivable,” was shocking, but not really as shocking as the arrogant dismissal by Eric Lichtblau of the government’s claims of risk. Lichtblau, a 1987 graduate of Cornell, is out on the speaker’s circuit making bucks off of his claims to know what the government is up to, but his resume is two decades of asking questions and writing up competing accounts of the truth. His schtick appears to be to minimize every concern that gets in the way of his paycheck.More here.
Finally, the Editors of National Review tell us why the leaks must be stopped:
Given that the Justice Department has gone to such extraordinary lengths to investigate a leak that has never been shown to have seriously damaged U.S. national security — in the case of perjury charges against Lewis Libby, Fitzgerald has said he does not plan to offer “any proof of actual damages” done by the Plame leak — it should certainly also be investigating a leak that clearly has done significant harm to our government’s efforts to keep us safe.
We’re referring, of course, to the New York Times’s exposure of the details of the Treasury Department’s program to monitor terrorist finances, one of a recent series of damaging leaks that also revealed the secret prisons in Europe and the NSA surveillance program. In an interview with NRO, former September 11 Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean, who was briefed on the terrorist-finance tracking program and asked Times executive editor Bill Keller not to disclose it, called it “a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties, and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.” When asked whether publication of details about the program did any damage, Kean answered, “I think it’s over. Terrorists read the newspapers. Once the program became known, then obviously the terrorists were not going to use these methods any more.” And by the way, the other co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Democrat Lee Hamilton, also asked the Times not to publish.
We know that some commentators — including, paradoxically, Keller himself, who played the story on the Times's front page — have suggested that the revelation was no big deal because terrorists already knew the U.S. was tracking their financial transactions. So why did the paper top its story with the headline “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror”? And beyond the headline, why did the article refer to information about the program as “secret” or “classified” not once, not twice, not thrice, but ten times?
And, as our David Frum has pointed out, far from revealing the vague outline of the program, the Times disclosed such key details as: American investigators have a hard time tracking ATM transactions in the U.S.; they can’t track wire transfers in real time; and the United Arab Emirates is cooperating with the program. All good stuff to know — if you want to evade U.S. scrutiny.
While we believe the Times made a terrible judgment in publishing the story, we do not question the paper’s legal right to do so (calls for an Espionage Act prosecution of the Times are pure fantasy). But we also do not question the government’s legal right — indeed, its obligation — to find, prosecute, and punish those who are responsible for leaking details of this highly classified program. They have recklessly and illegally harmed an important program in the War on Terror. It used to be thought that leak investigations always went nowhere, but now we have the experience of the Fitzgerald investigation to show us that reporters can be subpoenaed and leakers found out.
So far, judging by news reports, there is no such investigation going on. Perhaps there’s action we don’t know about, but the Plame precedent is instructive. When the CIA first referred the matter to Justice, nothing happened. It was only when then–CIA director George Tenet personally pushed for an investigation and his intervention was leaked to the press that Justice began to move. We expect the same aggressiveness in this case from new treasury secretary Henry Paulson.
If the Bush administration’s complaints about the damage done by the Times story are to be taken seriously — and they should be — it must pursue the government leakers who are the ultimate source of the damage. The administration’s allies aren’t going to let this one go.
They've got that right...
