Damn Them!

Much has already been written about this. Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup, and Pajamas Media is running another.

Just in case you haven’t heard, here are the salient points:

— Our intelligence teams have been running a brilliant secret operation that used access to Swift (an international financial clearinghouse) to track the funding of terrorist groups worldwide.

— Somehow, some of the most blatantly and militantly liberal reporters on the planet (at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, of course) discovered this fact.

— The reporters wrote their story, and in the course of doing so intelligence agencies discovered the intent to publish details of the secret effort.

— The government formally and officially asked both papers not to publish this information because it would blow the cover on a valuable operation that had stopped millions of dollars in terrorist funding and had netted at least one top-level terrorist financier.

— The two papers published the story anyway.

And now the operation, blown sky high, will have no further value in the war on terror.

The papers defend this action out of supposed concern for Americans' civil rights. They claim that Americans are having their transactions examined in an illegal fashion.

I claim that those papers have violated a much more fundamental civil right of mine — the right to have my life and property defended by my government. Those publishing houses — bastions of liberalism — are traitors to the American cause of the war on terror.

I would love to see someone in our federal government have the balls to initiate action to punish those reporters and all the editorial staff who approved publishing this story. Those people should be treated exactly as any ordinary citizen who gave the enemy a vital secret would be treated. They should be in jail, for a long, long time.

And what does it say about our country that in many quarters the reporters are being lauded, and treated like heroes? I can think of many implications of that, and not a single one of them is good.

Damn them! Damn them all to hell!