What Standards Does The NYT’s Use When Leaking Classified Material?

It is a fair question. Just this morning, I was informed that we have the right to know all of this! Although I am sure when pressed, one would be at a loss to find a law on the books that supports that theory!
Michelle has some wonderful links to the dissection of this latest revelation.

Patterico posts a valuable transcript of a radio interview conducted by LA Times columnist Patt Morrison with Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus about their blabbermouth article on the once-secret terrorist finance tracking program. Key portion with Patterico’s reax:

MORRISON: Doyle McManus, what kind of standards do you pretty much look at when you’re writing stories about national security? What standards do they have to meet?
McMANUS: Well, in a sense, we reason from the old wartime standard that if there is an ongoing military operation, an ongoing specific intelligence operation or an ongoing criminal investigation, uh, we don’t gratuitously reveal that unless there is a compelling public interest in doing so. You know, we don’t put lives of soldiers in danger. We don’t report that ships are leaving port.

Uh, but this was not a single intelligence operation. It was a change in policy. It was a change in the boundaries of what the government could do. It’s an enormous program that has allowed them to amass a huge database that essentially has the records of every international — not every, but an enormous percentage of the international banking transactions that have occurred since 2002 — and they’re keeping those.

Uh, we have been asking them, for example, they’ve told us: “Well, we are restricting our access to this database to cases we believe involve terrorism,” but when we’ve asked them, “Well, if, down the road, you decide you want to look into other categories of activity, could you do that?” they say, “Well, actually, yes. We do have the legal ability to do so.”

So, it’s — this is a broader issue than an individual operation. In any case, we take the question seriously of whether our disclosure of this policy change and this program will be to the disadvantage of legitimate government efforts against terrorism, and we have to weigh that against the legitimate public interest in knowing whether the government is changing the rules, knowing whether the government is operating within the law, um, knowing what the government is up to.”

Notes Patterico:

This, more than any other statement McManus makes, reveals the arrogance that upsets so many of us when we talk about this issue.
There are several problems with what you just said, Mr. McManus:

* Nobody elected you to be the guy doing that “weighing.”

* You did the “weighing” with insufficient information, because you didn’t have the full picture of how successful the program had been in fighting terror. Your reporters’ article states:

Current and former U.S. officials familiar with the SWIFT program described it as one of the most valuable weapons in the financial war on terrorism, but declined to provide even anecdotal evidence of its successes.

But as I have pointed out on this blog previously, the New York Times (unlike your reporters) managed to find officials who would disclose specific successes of the program — and those successes were significant. They included the capture of the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed 202 people. The president knows this. When you did your own personal “weighing” of the various factors, you didn’t.

* All of a sudden we have shifted the standard from a “compelling public interest” to a “legitimate” interest in “knowing what the government is up to.” Your defense of this burden-shifting appears to be: We didn’t reveal details on a single anti-terror operation, but rather details of a huge program that impacts several different terror operations. And, as to the question whether the government is “operating within the law,” you found no real evidence it wasn’t.

This leaves you in the position of having disrupted a major anti-terror program, by publishing classified information, with no justification other than telling your readers “what the government is up to” and “whether the government is changing the rules.”

As long as it’s legal, don’t you want the government to change the rules?? Don’t you want to prevent the next September 11?

You have to wonder with these people, don’t you?

The NYTimes, Bill Keller, rationalizes his paper’s decision here. Dan Riehl responds.

Hugh Hewitt dissects Keller here.

And Fred Barnes chimes in with this:

By now it’s undeniable: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives. The Times’s latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday’s front page–where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror,” the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects’ international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers.

The procedure for obtaining that information could not be more solicitous of privacy and the rule of law: Agents are only allowed to seek information based on intelligence tying specific individuals to al Qaeda; they must document the intelligence behind every search request and maintain an electronic record of every search; and, in an inspired civil liberties innovation that would undoubtedly garner kudos from the Times had a Democratic administration devised it, a board of independent auditors from banks reviews the subpoena requests to make sure that only terror suspects’ transactions are traced. Any use of the data for criminal investigations into drug trafficking, say, or tax fraud is banned. The administration briefed congressional leaders and the 9/11 Commission about the system.

There is nothing about this program that exudes even a whiff of illegality. The Supreme Court has squarely held that bank records are not constitutionally protected private information. The government may obtain them without seeking a warrant from a court, because the bank depositor has already revealed his transactions to his bank–or, in the case of the present program, to a whole slew of banks that participate in the complicated international wire transfers overseen by the Belgian clearinghouse known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. To get specific information about individual terror suspects, intelligence agents prepare an administrative subpoena, which is issued after extensive internal agency review. The government does not monitor a terror suspect’s international wire transfers in real time; the records of his transactions are delivered weeks later. And Americans’ routine financial transactions, such as ATM withdrawals or domestic banking, lie completely outside of the Swift database.

The administration strongly urged the New York Times not to expose this classified program, and for good reason. According to the Times itself, the program has proven vital in hunting down international killers. The Indonesian terrorist Hambali, who orchestrated the Bali resort bombings in 2002, was captured through the Swift program; a Brooklyn man who laundered $200,000 for al Qaeda through a Karachi bank was tracked via the program. The Wall Street Journal adds that the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings were fruitfully investigated through the Swift initiative and that a facilitator of Iraqi terrorism has been apprehended because of it.

A coterie of former and current Democratic and Republican leaders also begged the Times not to jeopardize this highly successful counterterrorism program, but the Times knew better. In a smug prepared statement, executive editor Bill Keller emotes: “We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

Now that the Times has blown the cover on this terror-tracking initiative, sophisticated terrorists will figure out how to evade it, according to the Treasury’s top counterterrorism official, Stuart Levey, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The lifeblood of international terrorism–cash–will once again flow undetected.

The bottom line is this: No classified secret necessary to fight terrorism is safe once the Times hears of it, at least as long as the Bush administration is in power. The Times justifies its national security breaches by the mere hypothetical possibility of abuse–without providing any evidence that this financial tracking program, or any other classified antiterror initiative that it has revealed, actually has been abused. To the contrary, the paper reports that one employee was taken off the Swift program for conducting a search that did not obviously fall within the guidelines.

The truth the Times evades is that while every power, public or private, can be misused, the mere possibility of abuse does not mean that a necessary power should be discarded. Instead, the rational response is to create checks that minimize the risk of abuse. Under the Times’s otherworldly logic, the United States might be better off with no government at all, because governmental power can be abused. It should not have newspapers, because the power of the press can be abused to harm the national interest (as the Times so amply demonstrates). Police forces should be disbanded, because police officers can overstep their authority. National security wiretaps? Heavens! Expose all of them.

The Times implies a second reason it ignored the government’s fervent requests to protect the program’s secrecy: Large databases were involved. The Times has an attack of the vapors whenever evidence of terrorist planning is found in databases, reasoning that any program to harvest that evidence is a privacy threat and should be exposed. Such logic, if taken seriously, would mean an end to all computerized investigations and would create an impregnable shield to terrorist activity in cyberspace. Anything a terrorist does that is recorded by computers will by its very nature be interspersed among records of millions if not billions or trillions of innocent transactions by unrelated parties. That fact alone should not disable the government from seeking the evidence; it merely means that the government should follow existing procedures governing the collection of evidence–as, in the case of the Swift program, it has.

The paranoia of the New York Times’s editors really has reached astonishing levels. When you think about it, virtually every piece of evidence ever gathered in criminal or national security cases is embedded in harmless activity. On the Times’s theory, police officers should not walk beats looking for criminal activity, because they are observing innocent passersby as well.

The Times offers a third justification for its reckless breach of national security: “The program . . . is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans’ financial records.” Indeed. And 9/11 marked a significant departure from most Americans’ experience of jet travel. The hijackings revealed unmistakably the need for innovative intelligence programs to disrupt future attacks. By the Times’s hidebound ethic, however, anything new that the Bush administration does to protect the public is suspect and must be revealed. Needless to add, this prejudice against innovation will not prevent the Times from raising hell about Bush administration incompetence if the country is attacked again, just as the Times railed against the administration for “failing to connect the dots” before 9/11–a failure caused in large part by unnecessary civil libertarian restraints on fully lawful powers.

The Times’s ritual invocation of the “public interest” cannot disguise the weakness of their argument for revealing this highly successful antiterror program. Its editors seem aware of this, and hence try to link this program to the more legitimately controversial NSA wiretapping program that was revealed (by the same reporters–Eric Lichtblau and James Risen) last December, also in defiance of administration requests. Though acknowledging in passing that the Swift program is in fact separate from the wiretapping program, the Times links them on the grounds that both “grew out of the Bush administration’s desire to exploit technological tools to prevent another terrorist strike.” The revelation of the NSA program has “provoked fierce public debate and spurred lawsuits,” the Times notes with self-satisfaction, and thus, by implication, the Swift program should, too. Do they seriously believe the U.S. government should not exploit technological tools in the war on terror?

Al Qaeda has long worked to manipulate the media in its favor. It can disband that operation now, knowing that, unbidden, America’s most powerful newspaper is looking out for its interests.

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