At the heart of the controversy surrounding The New York Times’ decision to run stories about the U.S. government’s secret detention centers in Eastern Europe, the telecommunications eavesdropping program, and now the financial eavesdropping program, is the question of which government programs can be revealed to the public and when they can be revealed.
America has survived 250 years worth of wars and scandal. Through it all, the press has served as a watchdog of the government, often times uncovering unflattering truths that our duly elected representatives and their appointees would rather be left in the dark. At other times, the press made more controversial decisions to inform the public of secret government programs that these officials claim would damage national security.
It is not true that only the winners write the history books. Sometimes, the losers figure out how they lost. Far after their defeat, these losers gather documents and connect dots that point to the moral ambiguity of the winners’ means of victory. History is revised and the winners don’t look so good in their new limelight.
We have no idea whether the decision by The New York Times and other publication outlets actually threatens national security. When I say “we,” I mean every single one of us, from the President to the citizen journalists in the blogosphere.
If our government is to be believed, then there is no doubt that we are all now at great risk because of a few newspaper articles. Reading between their lines, it seems that they are arguing that if terrorists attack America, we can safely blame The New York Times and everyone else who dared to talk about what the government did not want the public to know.
Some secrets should be kept secret: troop movements in wartime, for example. However, if the press is to maintain their watchdog role, then I would err on the side of more information being leaked, rather than less. No government has earned our trust enough to give them a blank check when it comes to managing domestic and foreign policy.
The New York Times can’t win; they were criticized (and they critcized themselves) over not asking enough questions and saying too little in the lead-up to the war. Now, they are criticized by our representatives in Congress and our President for asking too many questions and saying too much. Some threaten to pull their press credentials.
In a war that could last generations, I do not trust our government enough, or any other government, to manage the press.
Let the press duke it out with the government. That’s why we pay them; to do the job that we could not do on our own.
Who was criticized for “asking too many questions?” Who’s trying to “manage the press?” You make some good points here, but I think that you may be wandering into the realm of hyperbole (much like our press does at times, so perhaps you can’t be blamed in this regard).
There’s a significant difference between a government-run media and the government asking the a particular media outlet to not run an illegally-leaked story about a classified program currently being used to fight a very difficult war, and then wanting to censure that outlet for doing so.
“We have no idea whether the decision by The New York Times and other publication outlets actually threatens national security.” That’s not true, unless you’d simply call everyone involved with keeping intelligence on terrorist cells’ finances a liar. What the Gray Lady did was put lives at risk (said in a Jack Nicholson sneer) by making it more difficult to track al Qaeda’s money. That’s bad.
Nobody’s giving the government a blank check here. The problem is that the press has written itself that check, and has made itself the judge of what should be classified and what the public has a right to know (abetted by leakers in the intelligence community for reasons currently unknown). At least we put the bastards in office, when it comes to the government. We had no choice about Bill Keller.
I am skeptical that the NYTimes’ story puts anyone’s life at risk. I doubt that this story will impede — in any substantial way — the progress of the CIA or FBI to track down terrorists.
I think it is more likely that the President and others who object to their secrets being shown to the world are playing politics. They know that a story like this will make it seem like their clandestine activities border on illegality. They know this is “bad press,” so to speak.
Our government is in a damage control media campaign trying to turn the eavesdropping stories around on the whistle blowers. They do this by turning the story away from themselves to what the media is doing. This is government spin and I resent that our government is trying to scare the media into silence.
So everyone from both sides of the political aisle who asked the New York Times to not break this story is lying? Every elected official who had knowledge of the program and claim that its usefulness in fighting the War on Terror has now been diminished can be written safely off as spinmeisters? But the Times, they’re upright truth-tellers that should be trusted with intelligence secrets. Bill Keller’s now the arbiter of which secrets are safe to divulge and which aren’t?
There are “clandestine activities” and classified programs. Without drawing any sort of useful distinction between the two, there’s no reason to use covert intelligence at all. The public’s “right to know” becomes the highest authority.
There aren’t any whistleblowers here. There was a classified program that everyone (including the Times) acknowledged as being legal that has now been compromised by leakers with an axe to grind against the administration. That’s no more whistleblowing than me publishing my boss’s Social Security Number and credit card information on the internet because I didn’t get a raise this year.
It could be that I simply haven’t read enough about this story to get the full grasp of the nuances involved, but there seems to be more to it than nebulous accusations of “clandestine activities bordering on illegality” and a blanket accusation of lying on everyone’s part.
The press and the government do work together in determining what to publish. There are many cases — even the secret detention centers story– in which a story was delayed for months before publishing. As such, the press does not simply print what they want, when they want. Thus, Bill Keller is not the arbiter of which secrets to reveal.
Let me be clear: I think officials who are opponents to the NYTimes publishing the article are deliberately overstating the case to make themselves look better. If this is not lying, then it comes very close to it.
“Every elected official who had knowledge of the program and claim that its usefulness in fighting the War on Terror has now been diminished can be written safely off as spinmeisters?”
Yes. This may seem like a bold claim, but I believe this to be the case.
We’ll see if history shows this to be a truth or a falsehood.
Just because the Times delays a criminally leaked story before going to press, it doesn’t mitigate the crime of the leaker, nor does it absolve the Times of guilt.
What’s clear is that Bill Keller has indeed appointed himself the arbiter of which secrets are safe to reveal and which aren’t; the fact that we are writing about this story proves it.
Personally, I have a lot more faith in the way our elected officials are fighting this war than the way the New York Times thinks we should be fighting it.