All the Treason That's Fit to Print

The New York Times and L.A. Times are under massive fire from conservatives, and some liberals, this week for running a story a week ago about a secret U.S. government program that, under power of international subpoena, data-mined the financial records of a Belgian consortium that was known to handle transactions and probably money laundering schemes of known terrorists. The Belgian outfit, named SWIFT, provided this information, our people dissected it, and terrorists were actually caught with it.

No one who knew about the secret program questioned its legality, yet the NY and LA Times almost simultaneously ran major stories detailing the program's operations, under the idea of the public's need to know. Why the public had a need to know, no one seems to know. The paper's writers and editors, doing only interviews with "friendly" interviewers where they won't be seriously challenged, have made only nebulous assertions that the methods the government is using could conceivably be brought bear against the domestic population, so people need to know about this. That's it.

One thing is for certain: Al Qaeda now knows all.

It really is beyond despicable that these newspapers and their writers hate the country that enriches them so much that they are willing to sell it out in this way. Whether it was the truly damaging report a year ago on the administration's pursuit of terrorist telephone conversations into and out of the country -- which the NY Times (the same reporter - James Risen) exposed and which was completely secret -- or this program, which was also secret and had been proven to work, the Times appears not to care in any way. And they still claim they're not agenda-driven. Right.

Perhaps the most galling, the Times personnel have said in interviews that although the U.S. government met with them and urged them not to publish the story, they (the Times) thought and thought about it, then decided it was not going to cause any harm and published.

Where do you start with such asinine statements???? The government has pleaded with you to not publish to the entire world the details of a program no one is supposed to know about and the details of which you received from a person with security clearance who has broken the law by telling you. You listen to the government's pleadings (or do you, really?) and then you take it upon yourself, in your infinite wisdom and knowledge on national security matters, to go ahead and tell the whole world anyway. First of all, what claim do these people have to any real understanding of national security, the need for secrecy, the damage lost secrets can wreak, etc.? They are reporters. They have never even been run through a national security background check, much less received an official intel briefing. They haven't got the faintest damned idea of what damage their actions can cause. Yet they are arrogant enough to believe they know it all. Un-freaking-believable.

And in the second place, who died and made them intelligence czar? Who says they GET to release this information? On whose authority are they releasing state secrets to the world?

The Times argues that it's unreasonable to believe that Al Qaeda didn't already know this stuff. That's absolutely prepostorous and laughable. Every terrorist knew the specifics of what was being tracked, how, and where?

One thing's for sure: They do now. Guess who won't get caught there any more?

For its part, the U.S. Congress today was debating a non-binding resolution to basically censure "the media" for this outrage. Asked on national radio yesterday whether the NY Times or the LA Times would be named in the resolution, my local Congressman David Dreier said "No", and then went on to sputter about how it's not just them that are at fault, here, and that this kind of thing has happened before with other media outlets, he's sure of it, etc. etc. What a bunch of absolute garbage!! Hugh Hewitt, not known for getting angry, referred to himself as "ballistic" when he heard this. He asked Dreier a half-dozen times about this rationale, not buying it for a second, and I think Dreier, a political animal from head to toe, was expecting all kinds of praise for this act but got nothing but outrage and grief. Good. I was yelling at him myself during my drive home, listening to his nonsense. For God's sake, what does a newspaper have to do in this country to get scolded by the government??? How damaging a state secret do they have to reveal??

Mark my words: This stuff will not stop until the Bush Administration actually takes action against these traitors. Conservative pundit Andrew McCarthy said on Laura Ingraham's show the other day that the Times reporters ought to be brought into court under subpoena and asked who their leaker source was, and when they refuse to divulge the source, toss 'em in jail until they're willing to talk. He says they can be kept there for 18 months. Would it be worth a year and a half of confinement to not reveal a source that had damaged national security? Let's find out.

Reporter James Risen should be on the hook for 3 years, as far as I can tell, since he also broke the NSA wiretapping story a year ago. Is that leak - which did serious damage - even being investigated?? Who's to say that Risen's source is not the same person in both cases? Isn't it important to a) get that person out of the intelligence loop to stop further damage, and b) to lock that person up for treason? Why aren't we pursuing this? Why can't we muster even half as much outrage and prosecutorial zeal as the liberals have done in pursuing the Valerie Plame non-story?

Read more outrage at pretty much ANY conservative blog on the web. Hugh Hewitt has talked about it all week long, and Ann Coulter has an as-usual-devastating piece about it on her online column.

One final note: For all their claims that this release of secret national security information is not helpful to the terrorists because they already knew it all, word came out yesterday that the Belgians are "reviewing" the whole SWIFT program and it seems likely that they will end their cooperation with the U.S. government on it. If that's true, then it's PROVEN damage that these traitorous reporters have wrought against the United States.