FreeDuck wrote:John Murtha is credible now?
Not to me, but I figure he holds quite a cache for you folks.
Do you mean to tell me that because I think he is a fool, that citing him as a reliable source to those who believe him to be credible is somehow dirty pool?
Either you think him a Great Man (or at least a credible one) or you don't. It shouldn't matter what I think of him.
Let me see if I have this straight:
Murtha urged the NY Times not to publish the story.
Conservatives have an ill regard for Murtha
Therefore Murtha's urging of the Times not to publish the story was of no consequence.
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:Accurately or otherwise, my comment was a challenge to lefties and their legendary disrespect for sports.
But hey, keep popping off with your idiotic gotchas. I'm sure they make you feel special.
like their legendary disdain of Muhammad Ali?
Great example - How many Libs appreciated Ali for the spectacular athelete he was versus the darling of the then anti-war set and in your face black man? That he was anti-war and an assertive black man was never a problem for me. I loved the guy, and I loved his persona and his willingness to sacrifice for his convictions, but I doubt if he wasn't an incredible sports champion that I would have had as much regard for him. Without the sports platform the rest of his expressions didn't really differ him from the rest of a large crowd.
Now, I'm sure you'll tell me that you and most of your liberal friends had or have any respect for Jim Bunning, Jack Kemp, Tom Osbourne, JC Watts, Curt Schilling, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Don Mattingly, Lynn Swann, Tom Glavine, Mike Piazza, Steve Young, Roger Staubach etc etc etc.
i hope you don't mean "special" as in special ed, or i may have to take offense.
I'm not sure how that would be gratifying to you, but hey whatever....
MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing.
They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response.
The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly. We considered very seriously the government's assertion that these disclosures could cause difficulties for counterterrorism programs. And we weighed that assertion against the fact that there is an intense and ongoing public debate about whether surveillance programs like these pose a serious threat to civil liberties.
We sometimes withhold information when we believe that reporting it would threaten a life. In this case, we believed, based on our talks with many people in the government and on our own reporting, that the information on the Treasury Department's program did not pose that threat. Nor did the government give us any strong evidence that the information would thwart true terrorism inquiries. In fact, a close read of the article shows that some in the government believe that the program is ineffective in fighting terrorism.
In the end, we felt that the legitimate public interest in this program outweighed the potential cost to counterterrorism efforts.
Some readers have seen our decision to publish this story as an attack on the Bush administration and an attempt to undermine the war on terror.
We are not out to get the president. This newspaper has done much hard-hitting reporting on terrorism, from around the world, often at substantial risk to our reporters. We have exposed terrorist cells and led the way in exposing the work of terrorists. We devoted a reporter to covering Al Qaeda's role in world terrorism in the months before 9/11. I know, because I made the assignment.
But we also have an obligation to cover the government, with its tremendous power, and to offer information about its activities so citizens can make their own decisions. That's the role of the press in our democracy.
The founders of the nation actually gave us that role, and instructed us to follow it, no matter the cost or how much we are criticized. Thomas Jefferson said, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." That's the edict we followed.
This was a tough call for me, as I'm sure it was for the editors of other papers that chose to publish articles on the subject. But history tells us over and over that the nation's founders were right in pushing the press into this role. President Kennedy persuaded the press not to report the Bay of Pigs planning. He later said he regretted this, that he might have called it off had someone exposed it.
History has taught us that the government is not always being honest when it cites secrecy as a reason not to publish. No one believes, in retrospect, that there was any true reason to withhold the Pentagon Papers, although the government fought vigorously to keep them from being published by the New York Times and the Washington Post. As Justice Hugo Black put it in that case: "The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic."
I don't expect all of our readers to agree with my call. But understand that it was one taken with serious reflection and supported by much history.
Cycloptichorn wrote:Quote:
Because you appear to be drawing some distinction between the Times publishing "military" secrets, and what they've published. I'm trying to figure out what you see is the difference exactly.
The NSA isn't part of the military, neither is the CIA, neither is the Treasury department. So nothing that was published was a 'military' secret.
I am well familiar with the oft-cited 'broken Japanese code' story, thanks.
Cycloptichorn
I'm trying to figure out why you are drawing a huge distinction between military secrets and other secrets of the government.
Now, I'm sure you'll tell me that you and most of your liberal friends had or have any respect for Jim Bunning, Jack Kemp, Tom Osbourne, JC Watts, Curt Schilling, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Don Mattingly, Lynn Swann, Tom Glavine, Mike Piazza, Steve Young, Roger Staubach etc etc etc.[/color]
well, Ted Williams was better than either of them.
i would certainly vote for hillary if the opponent is dick cheney or jeb bush; if it's john mccain, i might go the other way.
Ticomaya wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:Quote:
Because you appear to be drawing some distinction between the Times publishing "military" secrets, and what they've published. I'm trying to figure out what you see is the difference exactly.
The NSA isn't part of the military, neither is the CIA, neither is the Treasury department. So nothing that was published was a 'military' secret.
I am well familiar with the oft-cited 'broken Japanese code' story, thanks.
Cycloptichorn
I'm trying to figure out why you are drawing a huge distinction between military secrets and other secrets of the government.
So then that means no paper should have writen any stories about Monica and Bill?
The government doesn't get to declare everything secret in a free society. Just because they did doesn't mean it is military in nature. The story that the US was tracking money was hardly new. We knew it was being done 5 years ago.
Why we ran the bank story
Quote:MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing.
They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response.
The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly. We considered very seriously the government's assertion that these disclosures could cause difficulties for counterterrorism programs. And we weighed that assertion against the fact that there is an intense and ongoing public debate about whether surveillance programs like these pose a serious threat to civil liberties.
We sometimes withhold information when we believe that reporting it would threaten a life. In this case, we believed, based on our talks with many people in the government and on our own reporting, that the information on the Treasury Department's program did not pose that threat. Nor did the government give us any strong evidence that the information would thwart true terrorism inquiries. In fact, a close read of the article shows that some in the government believe that the program is ineffective in fighting terrorism.
In the end, we felt that the legitimate public interest in this program outweighed the potential cost to counterterrorism efforts.
Some readers have seen our decision to publish this story as an attack on the Bush administration and an attempt to undermine the war on terror.
We are not out to get the president. This newspaper has done much hard-hitting reporting on terrorism, from around the world, often at substantial risk to our reporters. We have exposed terrorist cells and led the way in exposing the work of terrorists. We devoted a reporter to covering Al Qaeda's role in world terrorism in the months before 9/11. I know, because I made the assignment.
But we also have an obligation to cover the government, with its tremendous power, and to offer information about its activities so citizens can make their own decisions. That's the role of the press in our democracy.
The founders of the nation actually gave us that role, and instructed us to follow it, no matter the cost or how much we are criticized. Thomas Jefferson said, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." That's the edict we followed.
This was a tough call for me, as I'm sure it was for the editors of other papers that chose to publish articles on the subject. But history tells us over and over that the nation's founders were right in pushing the press into this role. President Kennedy persuaded the press not to report the Bay of Pigs planning. He later said he regretted this, that he might have called it off had someone exposed it.
History has taught us that the government is not always being honest when it cites secrecy as a reason not to publish. No one believes, in retrospect, that there was any true reason to withhold the Pentagon Papers, although the government fought vigorously to keep them from being published by the New York Times and the Washington Post. As Justice Hugo Black put it in that case: "The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic."
I don't expect all of our readers to agree with my call. But understand that it was one taken with serious reflection and supported by much history.
I can't type this any slower guys. Cyclops is the one who appears to be making a distinction between military secrets and other secrets of the goverment. Apparently -- and I can only say "apparently" because he's not made an effort to clarify -- Cyclops believes a newspaper should not publish "military" secrets, but anything else is fair game.
Ah, I see ..... newspaper editors are the best arbiters of what is and what is not a government program that should remain classified?
Quote:I can't type this any slower guys. Cyclops is the one who appears to be making a distinction between military secrets and other secrets of the goverment. Apparently -- and I can only say "apparently" because he's not made an effort to clarify -- Cyclops believes a newspaper should not publish "military" secrets, but anything else is fair game.
Yup, pretty much.
What is so hard to understand about this?
If the gov't doesn't want secrets getting out, they should do a better job of controlling leaks. The press has the perfect right - and responsibility - to print what they feel appropriate.
Quote:Ah, I see ..... newspaper editors are the best arbiters of what is and what is not a government program that should remain classified?
No, those who choose to leak are taking this into their own hands, not the editors of a newspaper. If it wasn't for employees who leaked, they wouldn't be able to get the info to print in the first place.
I don't agree with state-sponsored censorship. It is inherently unAmerican and was specifically warned against by our founding fathers. I can hunt up the Federalist Papers links if you like.
Cycloptichorn
Cycloptichorn wrote:Quote:I can't type this any slower guys. Cyclops is the one who appears to be making a distinction between military secrets and other secrets of the goverment. Apparently -- and I can only say "apparently" because he's not made an effort to clarify -- Cyclops believes a newspaper should not publish "military" secrets, but anything else is fair game.
Yup, pretty much.
What is so hard to understand about this?
If the gov't doesn't want secrets getting out, they should do a better job of controlling leaks. The press has the perfect right - and responsibility - to print what they feel appropriate.
Quote:Ah, I see ..... newspaper editors are the best arbiters of what is and what is not a government program that should remain classified?
No, those who choose to leak are taking this into their own hands, not the editors of a newspaper. If it wasn't for employees who leaked, they wouldn't be able to get the info to print in the first place.
I don't agree with state-sponsored censorship. It is inherently unAmerican and was specifically warned against by our founding fathers. I can hunt up the Federalist Papers links if you like.
Cycloptichorn
You are advocating a ridiculous and irresponsible position. You admit there are things that the press should not print, but for some reason you only limit those to "military secrets." It appears you think that had the Times published secrets of the DoD Intelligence, instead of the NSA or CIA, that would have been taboo. It's preposterous to make such a narrow differentiation. If a spook from CIA manages to get his hands on the agency's current NOC list, do you think the NYT ought to publish the contents of that list in its Sunday edition -- with impunity?
It wasn't I who limited it to 'military secrets' but a combination of tradition and the law.
The press does not have the right and responsiblity to print what they feel is appropriate. Yes it does If a newspaper story harms the US's ability to hunt down and prevent terrorists, it is flat out irresponsible for the newspaper to print the story. No, it isn't If a crime has been committed by said publication, said paper ought to investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I agree - what crime has been committed?
What is inherently unAmerican is to splash the details of several government programs aimed at preventing the next 9/11 terrorist attack across the front page a newspaper. It is this cavalier attitude of yours towards this matter that shows quite clearly why persons of your political persuasion are not capable of being trusted with the national security of the US.
Ticomaya wrote:If a crime has been committed by said publication, said paper ought to investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I agree - what crime has been committed?
Leaks and the Law
The case for prosecuting the New York Times.
by Gabriel Schoenfeld
07/03/2006, Volume 011, Issue 40
CAN JOURNALISTS REALLY BE PROSECUTED for publishing national security secrets? In the wake of a series of New York Times stories revealing highly sensitive counterterrorism programs, that question is increasingly the talk of newsrooms across the country, and especially one newsroom located on West 43rd Street in Manhattan.
Last December, in the face of a presidential warning that they would compromise ongoing investigations of al Qaeda, the Times revealed the existence of an ultrasecret terrorist surveillance program of the National Security Agency and provided details of how it operated. Now, once again in the face of a presidential warning, the Times has published a front-page article disclosing a highly classified U.S. intelligence program that successfully penetrated the international bank transactions of al Qaeda terrorists.
Although the editors of the Times act as if prosecution is not a possibility, not everyone concurs. One person who is still mulling the matter over is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Asked in late May about the prospect of prosecuting the Times and others who publish classified information, he by no means ruled it out. "There are some statutes on the books," he said, "which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility."
Unsurprisingly, given what is at stake, even that tentative opinion elicited a fire and brimstone denunciation from the Times. An editorial on May 24 dismissed as "bizarre" the attorney general's "claim that a century-old espionage law could be used to muzzle the press." It has long been understood, added the newspaper, that the "overly broad and little used" Espionage Act of 1917 applies only to government officials and "not to journalists."
But this interpretation, even if it were accurate (which it is not), is entirely beside the point. The attorney general did not mention the 1917 Espionage Act or any other specific law. But if the editors of the paper were to take a look at the U.S. Criminal Code, they would find that they have run afoul not of the Espionage Act but of another law entirely: Section 798 of Title 18, the so-called Comint statute.
Unambiguously taking within its reach the publication of the NSA terrorist surveillance story (though arguably not the Times's more recent terrorist banking story), Section 798 reads, in part:
Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information . . . concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States . . . shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both [emphasis added].
This law, passed by Congress in 1950 as it was considering ways to avert a second Pearl Harbor during the Cold War, has a history that is highly germane to the present conduct of the Times. According to the 1949 Senate report accompanying its passage, the publication in the early 1930s of a book offering a detailed account of U.S. successes in breaking Japanese diplomatic codes inflicted "irreparable harm" on our security.
The Japanese responded to the book's revelations by investing heavily in the construction of more secure codes. Thanks to the ensuing Japanese progress, the report concludes, the United States was unable to "decode the important Japanese military communications in the days immediately leading up to Pearl Harbor." In other words, the aerial armada that devastated our Pacific Fleet had the skies in effect cleared for it by leaks of classified information.
Leaks of communications intelligence secrets pose an equivalent danger today. The 9/11 Commission identified the gap between our domestic and foreign intelligence gathering capabilities as one of the primary weaknesses that left us open to assault. The NSA terrorist surveillance program aimed to cover that gap. The program, by the Times's own account of it, was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the war on terrorism. After it was exposed, a broad range of government officials privy to the workings of the program, including Democrats (such as Jane Harman of the House Intelligence Committee), said that the unauthorized disclosure inflicted severe damage on our ability to track al Qaeda.
Such leaks cause harm of a more general but no less consequential sort. In waging the war on terrorism, the United States depends heavily on cooperation with allied intelligence agencies. But when our own intelligence services demonstrate that they are unable to keep shared information under wraps, international cooperation grinds to a halt.
This is a matter not of idle conjecture but of demonstrable fact. During the run-up to the Iraq war, the United States was urgently attempting to assess the state of play of Saddam Hussein's program to acquire weapons of mass destruction. One of the key sources suggesting that an ambitious WMD buildup was underway was an Iraqi defector, known by the codename of Curveball, who was talking to German intelligence. But Washington remained in the dark about Curveball's true identity, and the fact that he was a serial fabricator.
Why would the Germans not identify Curveball? According to the Silberman-Robb WMD Commission report, they refused "to share crucial information with the United States because of fear of leaks." In other words, some of the blame for our mistaken intelligence about Iraq's WMD program rests with leakers and those in the media who rush to publish the leaks.
Given the uproar a prosecution of the Times would provoke, the attorney general's cautious approach is certainly understandable. But what might look like a prudent exercise of prosecutorial discretion will, in the face of the Times's increasingly reckless behavior, send a terrible message. The Comint statute, like numerous other laws on the books limiting speech in such disparate realms as libel, privacy, and commercial activity, is fully compatible with the First Amendment. It was passed to deal with circumstances that are both dangerous and rare; the destruction of the World Trade Center and the continuing efforts by terrorists to strike again have thrust just such circumstances upon us.
If the Justice Department chooses not to prosecute the Times, its inaction will turn this statute into a dead letter. At stake here for Attorney General Gonzales to contemplate is not just the right to defend ourselves from another Pearl Harbor. Can it really be the government's position that, in the middle of a war in which we have been attacked on our own soil, the power to classify or declassify vital secrets should be taken away from elected officials acting in accord with laws set by Congress and bestowed on a private institution accountable to no one?
Gabriel Schoenfeld is senior editor of Commentary. This article is adapted from his June 6 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
My position has always been consistent. Anything that the government wants to keep secret, they should keep secret, through penalty of jailtime or arrest for those who are charged with keeping the secret - the governmental employees themselves.
The NYT and other papers don't sign an oath to keep secrets for the government. They, in fact, have a responsibility to try and find out the truth for the citizens who read their papers. We can argue back and forth about what the best way to go about doing this is, but the fact remains that there is no real responsibility on the part of the paper to hide the fact that the administration is breaking the law on a regular basis.
Cycloptichorn
My position has always been consistent. Anything that the government wants to keep secret, they should keep secret, through penalty of jailtime or arrest for those who are charged with keeping the secret - the governmental employees themselves.
The NYT and other papers don't sign an oath to keep secrets for the government. They, in fact, have a responsibility to try and find out the truth for the citizens who read their papers. We can argue back and forth about what the best way to go about doing this is, but the fact remains that there is no real responsibility on the part of the paper to hide the fact that the administration is breaking the law on a regular basis.
Cycloptichorn
