posted June 28, 2006 06:22 PM            

When is The New York Times going to get around to uncovering an al-Qaida secret program?

In the latest of a long list of formerly top-secret government anti-terrorism operations that have been revealed by the Times, last week the paper printed the details of a government program tracking terrorists' financial transactions that has already led to the capture of major terrorists and their handmaidens in the U.S.

In response, the Bush administration is sounding very cross — and doing nothing. Bush wouldn't want to get the press mad at him! Yeah, let's keep the media on our good side like they are now. Otherwise, they might do something crazy — like leak a classified government program monitoring terrorist financing.

National Review has boldly called for the revocation of the Times' White House press pass! If the Times starts publishing troop movements, National Review will go whole hog and demand that the paper's water cooler privileges be revoked. Then there's always the "nuclear option": disinviting Maureen Dowd from the next White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Meanwhile, the one congressman who has called for any sort of criminal investigation is being treated like a nut. Don't get me wrong: Congressman Peter King is nuttier than squirrel droppings — but he's right on this.

Unless, that is, the country has simply abolished the concept of treason. We've got a lot of liberals who hate the country and are itching to aid the enemy, so what are you going to do? Indict the entire editorial board of The New York Times? (Actually, that wouldn't be a bad place to start, now that I ask.)

Maybe treason ended during the Vietnam War when Jane Fonda sat laughing and clapping on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down American pilots. She came home and resumed her work as a big movie star without the slightest fear of facing any sort of legal sanction.

Fast forward to today, when New York Times publisher "Pinch" Sulzberger has just been named al-Qaida's "Employee of the Month" for the 12th straight month.

Before the Vietnam War, this country took treason seriously.

But now we're told newspapers have a right to commit treason because of "freedom of the press." Liberals invoke "freedom of the press" like some talismanic formulation that requires us all to fall prostrate in religious ecstasy. On liberals' theory of the First Amendment, the safest place for Osama bin Laden isn't in Afghanistan or Pakistan; it's in The New York Times building.

Freedom of the press means the government generally cannot place a prior restraint on speech before publication.

But freedom of the press does not mean the government cannot prosecute reporters and editors for treason — or for any other crime. The First Amendment does not mean Times editor Bill Keller could kidnap a child and issue his ransom demands from The New York Times editorial page. He could not order a contract killing on the op-ed page. Nor can he take out a contract killing on Americans with a Page One story on a secret government program being used to track terrorists who are trying to kill Americans.

What if, instead of passing information from the government's secret nuclear program at Los Alamos directly to Soviet agents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had printed those same secrets in a newsletter? Would they have skated away scot-free instead of being tried for espionage and sent to the death chamber?

Ezra Pound, Mildred Gillars ("Axis Sally") and Iva Toguri D'Aquino ("Tokyo Rose") were all charged with treason for radio broadcasts intended to demoralize the troops during World War II. Their broadcasts were sort of like Janeane Garofalo and Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio — except Tokyo Rose was actually witty, and Axis Sally is said to have used a fact-checker.

Tokyo Rose was convicted of treason for a single remark she made on air: "Orphans of the Pacific, you really are orphans now. How will you get home now that your ships are sunk?" For that statement alone, D'Aquino spent six years in prison and was fined $10,000 (more than $80,000 in today's dollars).

Axis Sally was convicted of treason for broadcasts from Germany and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Pound avoided a treason trial for his radio broadcasts by getting himself committed to an insane asylum instead (which I take it is Randi Rhodes' "Plan B" in the event that she ever acquires enough listeners to be charged with treason).

There was no evidence that in any of these cases the treasonable broadcasts ever put a single American life in danger. The law on treason doesn't require it.

The federal statute on treason, 18 USC 2381, provides in relevant part: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States ... adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000."

Thanks to The New York Times, the easiest job in the world right now is: "Head of Counterintelligence — Al-Qaida." You just have to read The New York Times over morning coffee, and you're done by 10 a.m.

posted June 29, 2006 11:27 AM            

Remember me? We met in the elevator here at The Oregonian recently. Your decision to expose a secret program to track terrorist funding got me to thinking I had better write and apologize. I don't think I was sufficiently deferential on our brief ride together. I treated you like the executive editor of The New York Times who used to work for The Oregonian. I had no idea I was riding with the man who decides what classified programs will be made public during a war on terror. I had no idea the American people had elected you president and commander in chief.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. What's that they say -- sarcasm is anger's ugly cousin? I'm angry, Bill.

I get angry when a few unauthorized individuals take it upon themselves to undermine an anti-terror program that even your own paper deems legal and successful. I get angry when the same people decide to blow the lid on a secret program designed to keep Islamic terrorists from killing Americans en masse.

"The disclosure of this program," President Bush said Monday, "is disgraceful."

Strong words, but not strong enough, Bill.

Your decision was contemptible, but your Sunday letter explaining the Times' decision only undermined your case for disclosure.

"It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press . . .," you wrote. "[T]he people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy. . . . They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish."

Too true, but the issue here is your judgment. It would be one thing if you ran this story because the program was illegal, abusive or feckless. Yet your paper established nothing of the kind. In the end, your patronizing and lame letter offered only press-convention bromides ("a matter of public interest").

"Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff -- but it's the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements," you write, after providing a tutorial on how the government only wants the press to publish the official line and the press believes "citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news."

But this is a false and self-serving choice. The issue is your decision to publish classified information that can only aid our enemies. The founders didn't give the media or unnamed sources a license to expose secret national security operations in wartime. They set up a Congress to pass laws against disclosing state secrets and an executive branch to conduct secret operations so the new nation could actually defend itself from enemies, foreign and domestic.

Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff -- but it's the kind of elementary stuff that can get lost in the heat of strong disagreements. And get more people killed in the United States or Iraq.

Not to worry, you tell us, terrorists already know we track their funding, and disclosure won't undercut the program. (Contradictory claims, but what the heck.) You at the Times know better. You know better than government officials who said disclosing the program's methods and means would jeopardize a successful enterprise. You know better than the 9/11 Commission chairmen who urged you not to run the story. Better than Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were briefed on the program. Better than the Supreme Court, which has held since 1976 that bank records are not constitutionally protected. Better than Congress, which established the administrative subpoenas used in this program.

Maybe you do. But whether you do or not, there's no accountability. If you're wrong and we fail to stop a terror plot and people die because of your story, who's going to know, much less hold you accountable? No, the government will be blamed -- oh, happy day, maybe Bush's White House! -- for not connecting dots or crippling terror networks. The Times might even run the kind of editorial it ran on Sept. 24, 2001. Remember? The one that said "much more is needed" to track terror loot, including "greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities"?

posted June 29, 2006 01:37 PM            

"If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier," the father asked, "which would you like to see get shot?"

"I would want to see the American get shot," replied the adolescent. "It's the other guy's country. We shouldn't be there."

That radical young man who approved the killing of American soldiers by Communists was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. In 1992 he replaced his retiring father as publisher of what remains the most influential newspaper in the United States, the New York Times.

"We are enormously powerful, and we are very scary," this hereditary ruler and now chairman of the Times corporate empire (which also owns the Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and other media outlets) boasted to an Associated Press interviewer in 2003.

In his megalomania, this un-elected enfant terrible, "Pinch" Sulzberger, has moved the New York Times so far to the ideological left that even its sports columnists were told never to contradict the Politically Correct line of Times editorials and – what amounts to the same thing – its heavily left-slanted news reporting.

"Why do they hate us?" asked U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone. The "they" he referred to are editors of the New York Times who "have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety."

Days ago these editors again published classified details of U.S. government efforts to monitor and thwart foreign terrorists like those who on 9/11 skyjacked airliners, destroyed the World Trade Center Towers, struck the Pentagon and killed 3,000 Americans.

To serve "the public interest," wrote Sulzberger's hand-picked Executive Editor Bill Keller, the Times days ago exposed secret U.S. monitoring of international financial transactions through the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).

This monitoring had already made possible the apprehension of the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist behind the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 200 Westerners. (And, ironically, a September 24, 2001, Times editorial had called for precisely this kind of clandestine financial monitoring to help prevent future 9/11s.) This program's exposure by the Times virtually guarantees that it will catch no more terrorists.

Keller shares his boss's far-leftist ideology. Son of the former chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation, Keller was radicalized at Reed College and at the Times' Soviet and South African bureaus. This "objective" journalist once referred to three Republican U.S. senators as "the Taliban wing of the American right."

Religion is apparently one key to Keller's hatred for conservatives. He has described himself as a "collapsed Catholic" who is "well beyond lapsed." He has criticized President Bush's "public piety" and described Republican Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum as a "Catholic theocrat."

Keller wrote that Roman Catholic Pope John Paul II "shaped a hierarchy that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live." Keller wrote that the Catholic Church "exists first and foremost to preserve its power," and that "This is, after all, the church that gave us the Crusades and the Inquisition."

Like Sulzberger, Keller says that the New York Times has no liberal bias, just an "urban" perspective in its values and political views. "Traditionally, because our origins are urban," said Keller in a November 2004 USA Today interview, "urban cultural liberals tend to come across [in coverage] as more three-dimensional than conservatives or suburban Republicans."

This newspaper installed Fidel Castro as Communist dictator of Cuba with radical left reporting that sold him to Americans as an "agarian reformer." It won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from the Soviet Union that covered up Josef Stalin's genocide of as many as 17 million Ukrainians. Keller and Sulzberger refused to return this Pulitzer after the Times' dishonest reporting was documented because to do so, said Keller with Orwellian doublespeak, would be to "rewrite history."

And now, once again, the New York Times is giving aid and comfort to America's enemies.

How should Americans respond? Rep. Peter King, Republican from New York, has called for prosecution of Sulzberger and Keller under the espionage act, which would likely fail and turn them into martyrs.

National Review recommends pulling the Times' White House and congressional press credentials. This is opposed by the head of the journalist committee that rules on such credentials, Susan Milligan (a reporter for the Boston Globe, owned by the Times Company). The Times is now so partisan and so ideologically anti-American that it is more like the Communist Party Daily Worker than a legitimate newspaper trying to do honest reporting. But pulling its credentials would rally other threatened media to its side, set a troubling precedent, and create martyrs.

The Justice Department should demand that immunized Times reporters disclose who in the government – probably Clinton administration holdovers – so cavalierly put national security at risk by disclosing classified information. Reporters who refuse can spend 18 months in jail for contempt. Surely a Times willing to publish classified secrets in time of war cannot object to serving "the public interest" by exposing its criminal secret sources who for partisan purposes are endangering the public, can it?

(The Times evinced concern over hypothetical privacy violations by this anti-terrorist program, but neither it nor the ACLU seems concerned about government prying into our financial lives by the IRS or FinCEN [see http://www.fincen.gov/]).

If and when Islamist terrorists again strike the United States, the Times should be sued by every family of those the terrorists injure or kill.

posted June 29, 2006 02:11 PM              

change the negative..to positive..In LOve and Light..and what is right. .

For Justice We Stand...
United under GOD...all equally. .

posted June 30, 2006 12:36 AM            

The tinhorn brass and the leftist foot soldiers at the New York Times and its media cousins may not know it, but the NSA already has enough evidence to hang some of them and their friends for treason. The reason they don't know is because they are not nearly as smart as they think they are. In fact, the biblical admonition, "thinking themselves wise, they became fools" fits the Times to a "T."

It's important to recognize that disagreement is not treason. (How interesting that real liberals, before they were exterminated by a leftist fog of political correctness, used to relish disagreement.) It's not treason to disagree with elected officials over what America should be doing in the world – or about how the specifics are carried out. That's called healthy debate. While not infallible, it generally makes us stronger. It also builds consensus. Consensus allows us to move forward.

We no longer have healthy debate in America. That is because the leftists who took over the old liberals' institutions refuse to disclose their utopian socialist fantasy plans for an America under the thumb of an "empowered" United Nations (that is, we pay for everything and do what they tell us). The left's dream is a world where national sovereignty is but a fading memory of the Greatest Generation, as it dies off and the light of freedom goes out for good.

Instead of debate, today we have "talking points" distributed to loyalists and published as "analysis" in our nation's leading media outlets. These talking points are designed not to promote debate, but rather to squelch it. Political correctness was the left's tool to eliminate debate on their agenda. It's worked well. A real debate would force the left to reveal its true agenda, resulting in wholesale rejection by a large majority of the American people. The phony "debates" we have never seem to permit us to discuss the real issues. Real debate for the left is simply not an option. That is why they resort to subversion, and ultimately treason.

Once a nation has committed soldiers' lives to a policy, disagreement becomes a bit trickier, doesn't it? Debate during an election campaign? I think so. Impassioned editorial pages? The more the merrier. Debate on the floor of Congress. Yup, that's what they do. Debate in private meetings with one's boss? I'd consider that loyalty. Stealing secrets, handing them off to the press, knowing they will be read by our enemies? No. That's the definition of treason.

There is little that can be done, short of a cruise missile through the front door of the New York Times (to which I have no objection), to stop America's self-loathing leftists in the media from aiding our enemies by publishing how-to manuals for evading our defenses and destroying this nation. That's what today's "journalists" do. They can, however, be denied that information in the first place.

As the Times' own reports suggest, the NSA already has a list of who's talking to whom. (When you work for an employer, which the government is, you have no expectation of privacy on your employer's time or premises.) The individuals occupying positions of trust in our government and feeding the press our defense secrets need to be stopped. I suspect I'm not alone in thinking they need to be stopped permanently. American soldiers and civilians – perhaps a lot of them – will die if these traitors are not stopped. A message needs to be sent and received: Some of those involved in this treason need to pay with their lives. Their efforts to inform our enemies of our defenses are no different because they appear on the pages of the Tin Pan Times or Washington's Blue Nose Gazette. The end result – dead American soldiers and civilians – is the same as if those secrets had been handed personally to a terrorist intermediary.