Press traitors
The New York Times' report Friday on the administration's secret surveillance of financial transactions appears to me to have drawn more than the usual amount of blogospheric complaint. (UPDATE: Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responds to the criticism here.)
I think this is true for two reasons: First, although the program doesn't use warrants or subpoenas, that fact doesn't make it dead-bang illegal the way the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does the administration's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens' phone calls and Internet traffic. (For one thing, it involves a Europe-based cooperative.) Second, unlike the circumventing-FISA program (which needs a short, descriptive name not ending in "-gate," IMHO), which has produced no antiterrorism successes that we know of, the bank program, the Times reports, has had some successes.
Typically, after reports such as this, bloggers who support the president have criticized the media for their reports, while bloggers who oppose the president have supported the media, although the level of support has varied according to the clarity, or lack thereof, of the media issues involved. But with this report, even some bloggers who can be counted on to criticize the president are pronouncing themselves, at the least, ambivalent on the question of whether or not the Times should have reported on the program. (When anyone at Glenn Greenwald's blog, which has criticized the president unrelentingly, posts that at the least there are issues to be discussed, then I think it certain that there are, indeed, issues to be discussed.)
The response of the administration-supporting blogs, however, appears generally to be far less ambivalent: It's treason.
On this particular issue, I don't know whether the Times should have reported what it did or not. I'm inclined to think that if the program is legal and providing some benefit, AND if disclosing it would limit or eliminate future benefits, then reporting on it would be wrong. At the same time, I find it difficult to believe that terrorists such as al-Qaeda who have relied on wire transfers to move money around the world would not have suspected that such transfers were being monitored.
That said, the Times is up against a context it ignores at the country's peril (and which Keller's letter, linked in the update above, does not address): the repeated failure of this administration to recognize, and act within, existing law. From torture to wiretapping, the administration repeatedly has chosen to act as if settled law does not in fact exist, and frequently to lie about its actions in these areas. If the administration tells The New York Times the program is legal and effective, and that reporting about it will cause harm to national security, why should the Times believe the administration this time when doing so in the past has led it, and the nation, to grief?
These are complex questions. They need to be dealt with forthrightly, dispassionately and fairly.
Moreover, pre-emptive claims of "Treason!" proceed from the presumption that the accusers know not only what the accused did but why he/she did it. In the case of the Times, the closest accusers can come is a sort of implied inference that because publication would inevitably damage the country's ability to fight terrorism, then causing that damage must have been the Times' reason for publishing.
That's an awful lot of as-yet-unsupported suppositions. In addition, one could just as reasonably -- and perhaps more so -- infer that because the administration's approach to fighting Islamicist terror has been so flawed (protection of our ports, anyone?), the administration must have intended to allow us to remain vulnerable and thus is guilty of treason.
I suggest we start by focusing on actions and facts before we move on to examination of motivation. And I suggest we examine motivation very carefully before hurling accusations of treason.
And I suggest we all remember that competence, in journalism and government, carries a moral component.
UPDATE: Oh, dear. Looks like if we're going to shoot reporters for doing their jobs (comment at 0157 6/24) or figure out ways for them to die of "heart attacks" (comment at 1220 6/24), we're first going to have to execute the Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement. Plus which, it looks like this secret program actually wasn't all that secret.
Oh, well.
