Ouchie
Michael abandons his ordinarily calm demeanor and yells at the left.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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June 28th, 2006 at 1:33 am
The two are hardly equivalent. Take the two on face value for a moment. On the one hand, we have the explicit outing of an undercover agent working counterterror missions. On the other, we have a report about a surveillance program that reveals no specifics, and reveals almost nothing that hasn’t been openly discussed by the administration. (The only new revelation I’m aware of is the method of warrant authorization used. That the administration has been tracking certain financial transactions has been common knowledge for literally years.)
So I fail to see how these two amount to the same thing.
The problem I have with these complaints is that they throw up a white flag on accountability. If the government is doing something illegal, and it’s doing it in secret, and if press acquiesces to the administration’s wishes and neglects report on such activities because they’re secret, then there’s simply nothing to prevent abusive practices. So how do you ensure accountability? You’re left with “trust us.”
(And, of course, the idea that the NYT article somehow subverts national security assumes that the terrorist masterminds we’re dealing with are too stupid to realize that we’re monitoring their finances…)
Cross-posted at Michael’s blog.
June 28th, 2006 at 6:54 am
TGirsch, you’re right about one thing – the two are not equivalent, but the non-equivalency runs the other way. At the time of her “outing” Plame had not gone undercover for years – enough years, I might add, that the statute everyone originally got so up in arms about did not apply. No one, not even Plame herself, was endangered by it. On the other hand, we’re all endangered by this recent Times stuff, which provided far more detail than your post lets on, and which has in fact ended a once-successful anti-terrorism program – and one the Times itself had called for. Valerie Plame herself is more likely to get killed in a terrorist attack as a result of the NY Times disclosure than she is to be harmed as a result of her “outing.”
There is no evidence anyone was doing anything illegal here. Even the NY Times acknowledged as much in the original article. If they had been doing anything illegal, or at least anything arguably illegal (cf. NSA wiretaps), then there’d at least be a non-frivolous argument for disclosure in the “public interest.” Even then it wouldn’t be a slam dunk; responsible journalists would have to carefully weigh how serious the alleged violation is, vs. how much of a security risk they will create by spilling the beans. But that’s another discussion for another day. This one was easy – no credible allegations of illegal activity, no “public interest” in knowing the particulars of a program which, as you correctly noted, we already knew the generals about anyway.
No it doesn’t. It merely assumes that these “masterminds” are too “stupid” to figure out *how* we’re monitoring their finances, or at least “stupid” enough not to be 100% of their hunches.
June 28th, 2006 at 9:12 am
“undercover agent working counterterror missions”
Dude. She wasn’t parachuting into Baghdad under cover of darkness. She was a desk jockey. And if you believe her mendacious husband’s book she hadn’t been on assigment overseas since 1997.
Beyond that, you’re taking it as a fact in evidence that the Bush administration outed her, which is not a known fact despite Patrick Fitzgerald’s efforts.
June 28th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Xrlq:
You’re ignoring the point that the administration had openly talked about virtually everything in the NYT story; it’s not exactly as if it was a big secret, when much of it was public knowledge as far back as 2002. The elephant-in-the-room difference is that the Plame outing gave specifics and named names, and the NYT story did not.
And notice, of course, that it’s only the NYT that’s to be called treasonous. The GOP-friendly Wall Street Journal, which ran essentially the same story, mysteriously gets a pass.
And frankly, I’m disappointed in you with your bullshit “this endangerous all” rhetoric. I know you’re not stupid enough to actually buy that, so I can only assume that you’re being intentionally disingenuous. In other words, you know what you’re saying is complete and utter crap, and you don’t care, because it gives you another excuse to harp on the mythical “liberal media.” If you think this means I’m accusing you of being completely full of shit, it’s because I am.
Greenwald says it best.
Les:
No, I’m not taking that as a fact at all. At issue here is what’s appropriate for the press to report. Novak outed Plame (assuming she was actually undercover, as the CIA claims she was, and not in the “undercover in name only” state that Xrlq assigns to her), and for the purposes of this discussion, that’s all we need to know. The press reported on two items that were supposedly classified. One report gives only generalities, while the other gives specifics. All I’m saying is that those two things are in no way equivalent.
June 28th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Wrong and wrong. The general fact that the U.S. government was tracking international terrorists’ funds was indeed well known. The particulars outlined in this story were not. Why do you think it was splashed on the front page of the NYT? They’re not in the habit of running “news” stories that aren’t … well, news. Nor is the administration in the habit of pleading with newspapers not to run stories that on the pretext that they endanger national security, when they don’t, and when they don’t have any potential to embarass the administration, either. If all the administration cared about was its own image, it would have begged the newspapers in question to run the story.
No mystery there, just the usual liberal paranoia on your part. For one thing, the news division of the WSJ is not known for being particularly GOP-friendly; in fact, a recent study suggests it is more liberal than most other major newspapers. You might be confusing it with the editorial page, which is indeed GOP-friendly, but which played no role in running or not running the story in question. So if politics were the issue, I’d have gone after them and the LA Times (a paper every bit as knee-jerk liberal as the NY Times, and much worse written, to boot) alongside the NY Times.
In fact, when I originally blogged about the issue, that’s precisely what I did. I didn’t do that today, because in the interim I’ve learned that the L.A. Times didn’t make a final decision to run the story until after the NY Times had already run it, at which point the damage was done. I’ve also heard, secondhand since I’m not a WSJ subscriber and can’t read their version of “essentially the same story” online, that the WSJ version consisted only of on the record interviews with named sources, and divulged no classified information. I don’t know if that is true or not, but without being certain it is not, I’m loathe to accuse them of committing the same criminal acts that the NYT clearly did.
Indeed you are. I’m just surprised to see you admitting as much.
June 28th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Xrlq:
Indeed you are.
Heh. In the immortal words of Daffy Duck, “pronoun trouble.” 🙂
Otherwise, I’m guilty of using some imprecise wording, specifically “public knowledge,” which I meant as “publicly-available,” and which you read as “well-known.” The irony here is that if not for the GOP backlash to the NYT story, it probably doesn’t get very much attention. Shall we go after right-wing pundits as treasonous for causing this story to gain more attention?
If revealing vague information about an ostensibly classified program that the administration itself had previously publicly discussed is tantamount to treason, then the government can effectively protect any behavior simply by labeling it as “classified” with no worry of oversight from either the press or the American people.
And again, the NYT article gives far less detail than Bush himself has given in the past. I won’t exactly hold my breath waiting for you to call for Bush to be tried for treason.
June 28th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
Oh, and for the record, what makes the NYT story “news” (and why the administration got all pissy about it) isn’t because it revealed what surveillance tactics were being used, but because of this bit:
No, no reason why the administration would be upset about that. It’s not as if they’ve been taking heat for excessive disregard for privacy or habitual avoidance of meaningful judicial oversight or anything.
Of course, the puzzling thing in all of this is why the NYT is being painted as the evil entity here, rather than the “[n]early 20 current and former government and industry executives” who gave the information to the NYT.
To me, the key issue of interest here is not whether it’s acceptable to report on classified programs, but when and how such reporting is done. And I’m sorry, but in this case, there does seem to be a legitimate public interest question at issue, and I find the idea that this report helps the terrorists in any meaningful way to be patently absurd.