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Blame the New York Times

Jill

I haven’t been spending too much time in Wingnutteria lately, but it seems the right-wing bloggers are in quite a tizzy over the fact that several national newspapers published some information that the wingers believe is damaging to national security. By reading right-wing blogs and columns, though, you’d be under the impression that only the New York Times published this information, and that they gave the names, home addresses and current locations of U.S. troops.

Naturally, that isn’t exactly the case. These folks are up in arms because newspapers revealed a government surveillance program that monitered the funding of international organizations that may have ties to terrorist groups. Revealing this surveillance program didn’t endanger anyone’s life; it didn’t even shed light on the existence of a particularly effective anti-terrorism program. But it did open up a debate on civil liberties and national security. The editor of the Los Angeles Times has a good response to the whole ordeal, and it’s definitely worth a read.

And as Norbizness points out in the comments, it’s not just that evil liberal media that published this story. The WSJ and the Washington Times printed it, too. And yet those bastions of liberalism aren’t being attacked quite so much.

In the meantime, though, check out the right-wing hyperventilation. The pseudo-libertarian reaction is my personal favorite. And, since it’s not like they’re busy actually fighting the war they love so much, the wingers have made all kinds of retro posters telling the Times to shut the hell up. I was cracking up, but not in the way that the righties would have liked. Case in point:

nyt

I know, laughing is cruel. But come on…

14 thoughts on Blame the New York Times

  2. Notice how the Wall Street Journal (same story) and Washington Times (printing that we had been monitoring OBL’s satellite phone in 2001) are magically exempted from posterization. I guess consistency isn’t a hobgoblin that will be troubling those little minds.

  3. So, where’s the goodness in the LA Times response? This is what I saw:

    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.

    Huhhh? Exposed terrorist cells? When? Where? Public interest? Before this article? Again, where? When? And they are leaders against the GWOT? Leading the way in exposing the work… by writing one article before the war?

    Other then trying to stay up with the NYT, what was the public debate? Civil liberties? Whose liberties?

    The program caught the Bali terrorist leader, but that’s not something we would like to admit here. Oh, BTW how many lives did his terrorist group take before he was caught?

    Before we get into the chickenhawk BS. I am too old. I’ve already served, and have children in the Service.

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  8. A little shirty today, are we?

    CoRev, not that arguing with you is going to make a damn bit of difference, but “Whose rights?” — well, YOUR rights, idiot, and mine, and everyone else whose bank records have been trawled through on some snipe hunt for terrorists.

    This is another one of those “vast database” programs where the personal information of ordinary Americans was collected as a matter of course and justified by counterterrorism. Yet this kind of database is simply too much information — the CIA already has too much data to process and translate. It’s a waste of resources to maintain this kind of database unless your purpose is something other than fighting terror.

    There are provisions in the law for obtaining warrants for this stuff, but the Bush people think they’re above the law. Time and time again.

  12. Zuzu, when you say: …YOUR rights, idiot, and mine, and everyone else whose bank records have been trawled through on some snipe hunt for terrorists.” Calling me names is cheap; however, you are wrong. The funds xfers tracked were institutional not individual.

  13. Wrong. The funds transfers were those that went through a banking collective in Belgium, but they included transfers by individuals. And there were no warrants obtained; they just started monitoring “suspicious” individuals and groups without any specific evidence of terrorist activity.

    Or at least that’s what they’re saying at this point. They claimed that they weren’t wiretapping American citizens, or collecting information on calls made within the United States, but — whoops — they were. I expect that we don’t yet know the full extent of this program, and that further investigation will reveal that it’s broader and deeper than is now known.

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