A letter jointly authored by New York Times’ Bill Keller and the Los Angeles Times’ Dean Baquet asks “When Do We Publish a Secret?” This is all they can come up with:
. . . we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public’s interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.
In the the latest instance—the monitoring of international banking transactions—the legality of the disclosed program was clearly not a factor in the decisions of the two papers to make public a previously classified program. Consider these words from Richard Clarke’s and Roger Cressey’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times:
Monitoring international bank transfers, especially with the knowledge of the bank consortium that owns the network, is legal and unobjectionable. [emphasis added]
Also not weighing in their decisions was the possible—indeed likely—reaction of foreign governments (e.g, Belgium), international institutions (the European Parliament), and newspapers (e.g., the Irish Times).
As evidenced by the title of their op-ed (“A Secret the Terrorists Already Knew”), Clarke and Cressey are telling us that the two papers divulged non-secret secrets. How they can be sure that every Al Qaeda operative was already fulled informed escapes me.
In their initial article on the bank transfer program, the New York Times described it as a “secret Bush administration program.”
So, in summary, here’s what we have:
1. Classified information was published.
2. The legality of the program was not considered important.
3. The international reaction to the disclosures was either dismissed or considered unimportant.
4. The information was, according to Clarke and Cressey, already known.
Even if it is assumed (which I don’t) that Clarke and Cressey are right, how could that be sufficient reason to outweigh the combined weight of the first three of these considerations? If this is an example of the decision-making at the two papers, we have reason to be worried.
Once more, from the MSM, a categorical and assiduous dismissiveness, nothing more than that beyond, of course, CYA blandishments.
“If this is an example of the decision-making at the two papers, we have reason to be worried.”
I don’t care if they make the best decisions in the world… they did not put themselves forward as candidates, did not take positions that could be evaluated by the electorate, and were not elected to MAKE ANY decisions, good, bad or otherwise, about national security.
Will they let us make some hire-fire decisions at their goddamn paper, or is it perhaps just them that gets to make everone else’s decisions without any accountability? NYT=POS