If it is to stop them from revealing a secret program that they feel is critical in keeping us safe, yes. Our security is the first job of our governement. Without it, the other ones don’t mean jack.
Now, in this case, based on the government’s seemingly half-hearted attempt to keep it secret, I don’t think we’re in the “critical program” territory. Still, I don’t see what the upside of this was. The program was legal. It was working, having produced real results. Now, what do we get in return for giving that up?
The government is far more dangerous to us than all the terrorists in the world. Keeping an eye on it is more important than it keeping an eye on the terrorists. And that’s assuming the government is seriously trying to fight terrorism, which I don’t believe. The “War on Terror” is primarily an excuse to pursue other agendas.
Look, I despise what the Bush Administration’s doing, and I’m as nervous about secret government programs as anyone…
BUT, I’m sympathetic to the OP’s argument; it’s not quite as cut and dried to me as some posters here seem to think. I’m not entirely sure that publishing state secrets is always a good thing. It just seems that way because of the shady civil liberties nature of the stuff that’s been revealed so far. Now, I’m not going to go as far as some conservatives who’ve been resurrecting those WWII “keep your damn mouth shut” posters (the leakers have the lion’s share of the blame, in my mind), but I just can’t accept the idea that it’s a good thing, all the time, for the media to publicize any secret they happen to get their hands on. I don’t know how to fix it, or if it CAN be fixed, but that’s how I see it.
Then there would be no “it”.You might as well say of the Catholic Church, “Take the priesthood out of it. Take the cathedrals and Vatican out of it. Take religion out of it.”; not much left, is there.
That depends on the government and the people in control.
:rolleyes: Yeah, like it’s sentiment original to me, or some kind of extreme view. The government is far more powerful and therefore dangerous than all the terrorists that have ever lived. Govenments like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia killed far more of their own people than a whole army of terrorists would have. Not to mention that the US government in the name of the “WOT” has killed as many or more Americans is Iraq than the terrorists did, for no better a reason.
Governments are a necessary evil. You don’t have to go abroad to find great governmental abuses.
Right here in the land of the free and home of the brave where all men are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights our government, acting in our name, drove the native population off land they had occupied for several thousand years using the justification that we wanted it. In fact the natives weren’t making efficient use of the land and it was our “manifest destiny” to correct that insult to God’s Word (Gen. 1:28). This claim was expounded on the Floor of the US Senate by no less a person than John C. Calhoun, an ante-bellum political giant.
I think the defense of free media is much more an issue of “national security” than are civilian surveillance programs. The America we ought to be keeping safe is the America in which freedom of speech is important enough to be encompassed in the first amendment.
According to the Associated Press, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is urging the Bush Administration to file charges of treason againt the New York Times – its publishers, editors and reporters – for revealing the Treasury Department’s work with the CIA in surveilance of international financial transactions. Rep. Peter King is particularly concerned about the Times because it also disclosed the secret domestic wiretapping. He is charging that the New York Times is “more concerned about a left-wing elitist agenda than it is about the security of the American people.”
This man makes me feel very insecure. The irony reminds me of how the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities acted in some basically unAmerican ways.
Meanwhile, according to the same article, U.S. Attorney General Gonzales says that Freedom of the Press is not absolute when it comes to national security. It’s interesting to see that the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee wants the line drawn to exclude “left wing agendas.”
As I understand it, this program doesn’t target suicide bombers; it targets the assholes who pay for the explosives. And yeah: if those people realize that there’s a good chance their little hobby is going to get them prison time or execution, it may well be a deterrent.
What do we get? We get the ability to decide, as a people, if this is something we want our government to be doing. You obviously think so; others obviously don’t think so. How, in a democracy, ought we to resolve this conflict? Could we resolve it if the press refused to do their job?
The problem with this statement is accountability. The problem is that “they” are not some all-knowing benevolent force. “They” are people. “They” are people with flaws, people with their own perspectives on the world and what “their” role is in it.
This isn’t in itself a bad thing. People are people, some good, some bad, most are a mix of the two depending on the details of the specific situation.
The problem comes when you take accountability and transparency out of the picture. When you do this, the people no longer have the information to decide that “they” are no longer acting in their best interests.
To give an example. I am President. I know deep in my heart that I am the right person for the job. I know deep in my heart that there is no one else currently electable that can do as good a job of protecting the citizens of the United States, improving the day to day lives and finally acting in the best long-term interests for the world at large.
I also “know” that were it to come to light that I won my re-election partially through using my executive powers to spy on the strategies of my opposition I would be impeached. The fact that I killed those strippers wouldn’t help either.
Either way I know that keeping these secrets is allows me to stay in power and thus effectively protect the American people wheras, if some one else where in charge the results would be disasterous.
It’s an extreme example to be sure but I’m trying to point out that the government cannot be allowed to simply decide what the public does and doesn’t have a right to know simply on what they “feel.” This is why we have oversight, this is why we have checks an balances.
Now, I certainly do not believe that all details of government activities should be declassified and open to the public, but I do believe that decisons in regards to what is and is not releasable should not rest on a single individual or organization. This is why we have oversight, this is why there must be accountability for those responsible for that oversight. And finally, to mitigate the “who watches the watchers” problem, this is why we have checks and balances; to disperse the authority.
This is why decisions such as these cannot be based on what they “feel” is critical.
Which is at least equally true of the press. What accountability do they have?
In a majoritarian republic, the people can be assumed to have consented to the actions of their representatives. But nobody voted for the New York TImes, and there is no way to replace the editors if one disagrees with their ideas of what should and should not be confidential.
I have a say, however indirectly, in who is elected to make these decisions. I have none in the editorial policy of the NYT. Why should I have to trust them? Why should I assume their motives are more pure than anyone else’s?
I’m sure the Washington press corps would dearly love to be the arbiters of what I can and cannot know. But they have an agenda just as surely as anyone else.
The Pentagon papers are actually a reasonable example. Ellsberg was seeing a psychiatrist, IIRC. Therefore, many would assume that he had psychological or emotional issues of some sort. Isn’t it possible to assume that this is information that should be available when we decide who should be responsible for deciding what information should be secure, and what should not?
Why should an un-elected body like the New York Times be the ones who decide, and how do we overrule their decision if it is wrong?
Shouldn’t they be required, for example, to publish the names of all their confidential sources so the public can evaluate their truthfulness or otherwise?
To the contrary. You vote for the New York Times every time you buy a copy. Or you might buy the News or the Post. Your decision affects the newspapers’ relative circulation, their public influence, and their advertising rates. When you decide whether to buy that or some other paper, you can base the decision on whatever factors seem good to you, including your perceptions of the paper’s reliability for reporting the truth, or other factors such as its loyalty to our government. Democracy of the marketplace – something all conservatives should be able to get behind, yes?
Capitalism, the Opinions page and the Freedom of the Press.
As BrainGlutton said, the first way they are held accountable is through capitalism. If they’re wrong (or even if they’re not and they just piss off enough of the public by being right), the public stops buying, their ad sales drop and they fold.
The second way they’re held accountable is the Opinions page, both of that newspaper and their competition (I have my hands full with the Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and my local paper, so I don’t read the Times…I’m assuming here they accept letters to the editor from ordinary folks, and that they print criticisms of their own paper. If not, focus on the part about the competition). If they write something which enough people disagree with and they’re reputable, they’ll run some of that criticism on their Opinions page. Other papers probably would as well.
The third way they’re held accountable is through the Freedom of the Press. If you have a problem with the Times and I have a problem with the government, it’s a lot easier (and more legal…) for you to print up your own paper the way you think it should be printed than it is for me to set up my own government and run it the way I think it ought to be run.
And for those who feel we should give blind loyalty and loyal blindness to the government once national security is invoked, I’ll point out that the first person prosecuted via the Patriot Act was not a terrorist or arms dealer. It was Michael Galardi, the owner of a Las Vegas strip club. He had no connections with any foreign governments or terrorist organizations. He was being investigated for bribing public officials. But once the Patriot Act was on the books, it was immediately used for criminal investigations that had nothing to do with its alleged purpose. When you hand over control to the government, don’t be surprised if they have no self-control.
It targets the network that includes the final recipients of the money, who might be the bombers themselves, and the people who make the bombings (big and small) possible. And I’d say that neither group is easily dissuaded from carrying out their desires.
The unfortunate fact is that we cannot be party to every decision the government makes on our part regarding national security. Should the D-Day assualt on Normandy been voted on?, etc.
That is an assumption I made based on the articles. In them, and in the discussions I’ve heard on TV since, there has been no allegation of wrong-doing. I assumed that if it was not in the NY Times article that it was not there. Do you know differently?
Shodan covered much of what I’d say in repsonse to the rest of your post.
The administration has it in for any newspaper or other media that won’t roll over for their commands. The sad thing about the Congressman’s statement is that this news was already in print before the Times printed it. In this post the site I cited shows that news of the investigation of financial dealing was exposed by Ron Siskind in the book The One Percent Doctrine. Publicising that the US is tracking financial transactions is equivalent to publishing that the US gathers intelligence. From 9/11 on anyone with any common sense would assume that one of the ways to hamstring terrorist organizations would be to interfere with their money supply. It is ludicrous to assume that the more sophisticated terrorists didn’t assume the same thing.
The US has long, and rightly so I think, tracked transfers of money, I believe it’s in amounts of $10,000 or more, offshore as a means of combatting the drug trade.
I don’t see that the Times as said anything that people didn’t already assume was going on all of the time.
