Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
AEON said:
Of course it is red meat - it is a response to writers and posters like yourself that apparently do not understand that the global jihad against Americans was already underway.
BTW - isn't it about time the NY Times stops publishing classified material. I am pretty sure there is a law or two about printing such documents.
no freaking way.
i have said, repeatedly, that i do not underestimate the lethality of the individual jihadist.
where we disagree is how we propose to battle said jihadists.
wake up: we are less safe because of Bush. and what, pray tell, did Bush do in his 8 months in office? nothing. nada. and his response to 9-11 has been the biggest American foreign policy since Vietnam.
as for the classified material ... please. no laws were broken. there is nothing in here no one already knew.
Dana Priest of the Washington Post spoke about this on Meet the Press, July 2, 2006 (she broke the story of the secret CIA torture chambers in Eastern Europe):
[q]MS. PRIEST: Every time there’s a national security story they don’t want published, they say it will damage national security. But they—for one thing, they’ve never given us any proof. They say it will stop cooperation, but the fact is that the countries of the world understand that they have to cooperate on counterterrorism. And just like the banks that did not pull out of the system, other countries continue to cooperate, because it’s a common problem.
MS. MITCHELL: But, Dana...
MR. HARWOOD: Have you heard...(unintelligible)...are pulling out from this system? I don’t think so.
MS. MITCHELL: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize—you for that story and Jim Risen and others for another story—were, “not worthy of an award but rather worthy of jail.” Dana, how do you plead?
MS. PRIEST: Well, it’s not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can’t publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.
Now why isn’t it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn’t it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight, and you can’t do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena. To do a better job—and I believe that we should’ve done a better job—we would’ve again, found ourselves in the arena of...
MS. MITCHELL: But, we’ve now had a steady drum beat from the White House all week about this, as you’ve pointed out. Here’s what the president and the vice president have been saying on the stump at campaign events.
(Videotape, Wednesday):
PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: Last week, the details of this program appeared in the press. There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it, and no excuse for any newspaper to print it.
(End videotape)
(Videotape, Monday):
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: The leaks to The New York Times and the publishing of those leaks is very damaging.
What is doubly disturbing for me is that not only have they gone forward with these stories, but they’ve been rewarded for it—for example, in the case of the terrorist surveillance program—by being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalist. I think that is a disgrace.
(End videotape)
MS. MITCHELL: John, is this policy of trying to use the press as a whipping boy going to work to excite the conservative base and to turn voters out in the midterm elections?
MR. HARWOOD: Well, Republicans certainly think so. They—if you’re a Republican in the White House or in Congress, would you rather talk about immigration, gas prices, the estate tax, all the things that you can’t get done right now, or would you rather go after The New York Times, the Supreme Court on the Guantanamo ruling—we’ll talk about that later—and make hay and say “They’re tying our hands in the war on terrorism”? It’s obvious they’d rather do the latter, and they love this discussion. They’re going to love it even more if Congress takes up legislation on Guantanamo.
MS. MITCHELL: This is, this is clearly not something new. Let me show you a tape from 1992.
(Videotape, October 22, 1992):
PRES. GEORGE BUSH: Here’s my favorite bumper sticker of all, “Annoy the media, re-elect Bush.”
(End videotape)
MS. MITCHELL: And the Democrats, of course, also do this. This is how the Boston Globe covered a Howard Dean-for-president campaign rally back in 2004. “Dean ... told a crowd of supporters [that his campaign] was ‘a struggle between us and the Washington politicians and the established press.’” Bill Safire, what does this remind you of?
MR. SAFIRE: It reminds me of a piece that I did back in the Carter administration where I wrote that Billy Carter, the president’s brother, was overheard talking many times with the Libyan Embassy, and the White House got very excited about that. Why? Because they said the Libyans didn’t know that we had a tap on their embassy. Now, that struck everybody in Washington as totally foolish because for the last 50 years, every single embassy in this town is bugged. Now here’s the president saying, “Who knew that—the details of this program?”
MS. MITCHELL: Let me refresh all of our memories about something else that happened. Take a look at this piece of film.
(Videotape, September 16, 1970):
VICE PRES. SPIRO AGNEW: In the United States today we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
(End videotape)
MS. MITCHELL: OK. Now whose alliterative phrase was “nattering nabobs of negativism,” Mr. Safire?
MR. SAFIRE: Well, Mr. Agnew was kind enough to credit me with that afterwards because I’m an alliteration nut.
MS. MITCHELL: This was when you were the speechwriter in the White House.
MR. SAFIRE: Right. And I was on loan to Agnew for that speech. I didn’t write the Des Moines speech, Pat Buchanan did that, where he really zapped the press. And again, the Nixon administration in that case got a leg up. And people said, “Hey, yeah, we’re angry at not just Nixon. We’re angry at the Congress and we’re angry at the media.”
MR. BENNETT: Can—may I—can I, can I...
MS. PRIEST: Still, the point is the tension between the media and the government is long-standing. And that’s to be expected. And in fact, all these—many of the people getting up to lambaste the media now are also people that we talk to with our stories, to vet our stories, to say, “What is it in this story that you’re most concerned about?”
MS. MITCHELL: You mean, to hold things back?
MS. PRIEST: To hold things back. In the prison story, we talked with the administration. No one in the administration asked us not to publish the story. In fact, people said, “We know you have your job to do, but please don’t publish the names of the countries where the prisons are located.” So there is a reasoned dialogue that often goes on between the media and the government behind, behind all this.[/q]
(and i'd link, but my compter is being screwy)