Gray Lady Sinking

Remember the bombshell reporting by the New York Times, revealing that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on conversations between Americans (citizens or residents) and suspected Al Qaeda members? The allegation from the Times was that this eavesdropping ("spying") was illegal, as it was conducted without warrants.

Well, things have gotten a little complicated for the Gray Lady. First, it turns out that most Americans have much more common sense when it comes to security than your average liberal elite — as President Bush said, if someone is talking to Al Qaeda, we want to know why and we want to know what they said. Duh! Next, it turns out that the supposedly illegal eavesdropping is in fact arguably completely legal, under the President’s power to conduct a war. In fact, many other Presidents have exercised this power, and aggressively defended its use — including those liberal icons and heroes to the New York Times: Presidents Dhimmy Carter and BJ Clinton. Oops!

The Democrats, after trying to use the NSA wiretaps as partisan political weaponry, are now in full retreat on the issue. One suspects they may have heard from their collective constituencies that they were about to saw off vital parts of the Democratic body politic. Democrats are now calling for the continuence of the NSA wiretap program (hard to fathom, after their rhetoric of the past few weeks!). They’d like to have Congressional control of the program, of course. Let’s hope the administration doesn’t fall for that one!

But the Gray Lady now has other problems. The biggest one is that their reporting was illegal. We have laws against the leaking of classified information, and we have laws against the knowing reporting of classified information, no matter what the source of it was. The New York Times is under investigation by the FBI, pursuant to these alleged (but rather obvious) violations of the law. And its reporters are likely to be called before a grand jury to testify about how they obtained the information — their sources, in other words. Oops.

The Times' executive editor had this to say:

From the New York Times (2/12/2006):

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said no one at the paper had been contacted in connection with the investigation, and he defended the paper’s reporting.

"Before running the story we gave long and sober consideration to the administration’s contention that disclosing the program would damage the country’s counterterrorism efforts,” Mr. Keller said. “We were not convinced then, and have not been convinced since, that our reporting compromised national security."

As Dafydd at Big Lizards points out in a great roundup and commentary on this topic, that’s quite a interesting legal defense Keller posits. Dafydd calls it the “I don’t believe it!” defense. This is like someone stealing my car and then saying they committed no crime, because they weren’t convinced that they’d stolen it. Humbug.

I am greatly cheered by this development, and I hope the Bush administration pursues this to the point of obtaining convictions and sentences — both for the leakers, whoever those twits may be, and for the sanctimonious reporters who thought they were above the law. This would be a really good lesson for those liberals (or just generally anti-administration folks) who think they can, without consequences, commit acts that harm this nation in order to pursue their political agendas. Yup, that would be a good lesson.

The assertion, which Keller repeats above, that revealing the NSA wiretapping didn’t compromise security is utter nonsense that has been soundly demolished by many commentators. To believe otherwise, you’d either have to believe that Al Qaeda was so stupid that they’d continue making those calls even after finding out (thanks to the Gray Lady) that they were being listened to, or you’d have to believe that the NSA was so stupid that they were listening to conversations for no reason. In all other cases, revealing the existence of the NSA wiretapping program causes America real harm, as it removes a valuable source of intelligence information — and makes it easier for Al Qaeda to operate against us, securely.

What do you call an American who aids an enemy who is fighting America? A traitor, that’s what. And in my book, that’s exactly what the New York Times has shown itself to be…