An earlier Quillnews post said The New York Times under Pinch Sulzberger has lost the people's trust because it no longer has the capacity to identify the people's enemy. (QN) Little did I know that Times editors and reporter James Risen would provide proof two days later: the NYT story Friday about Bush 43's approval of NSA wiretaps on Al-Qaeda after Sept 11. (NYT) As the Times itself reported:
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
Bush 43 to his credit in an address Saturday offered this comment:
This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country. (Byron York NRO Corner, LGF, Powerline)
So the Times held back "some" of the information that could be useful to terroists, but admitted printing some information that was helpful to terrorists. Okay, noted. But here's some information also held back by the Times that readers might have found of interest: that the reporter had written a book about US surveillance techniques against terrorists, and this "news" story just happened to appear in time to help promote sales of his book, being published by The Free Press, whose parent also owns CBS. (Can a 60 Minutes story be far behind?) (Malkin, Drudge) The "news" story coincidently also appeared on the Times front page just as Congress was considering renewing parts of the Patriot Act which Pinch opposes -- an appearance that enabled partisan pandering pols in Congress to go in high drama Friday to wave the NYT front page, demogogically demand investigations and special prosecutors and also stop renewal of the Patriot Act. Oddly, this show of massive denial by the NYT, its echo chamber in the media and Congress, was done on a day - Friday - when administration programs had not only continued its success in preventing a second Al-Qaeda attack in the US, but also had assured the freest, fairest and most hopeful election in the history of the Middle East. Quillnews asks: whose side is the NYT on? Or asked another way: is the problem that the Times simply does not have a "side" in the war on terror - except its own private self-interests? I'm serious.
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