President Bush vs. The New York Times
Instead of reading The New York Times, it's quite possible White House staffers are using the venerated newspaper as fish wrap or lining for canary cages these days.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and congressional leaders -- primarily Republicans -- are calling a recent Times report disgraceful, dangerous, even illegal.
In a nutshell: The Times
told the story of a secret program to track terrorists by monitoring bank accounts, and
the White House believes the Times report has endangered national security.
Some concern seems reasonable. It is never good when the away team gets a free peek at the home team's playbook. Furthermore, terrorists widely and commonly monitor U.S. media sources for their own intelligence gathering purposes.
We know, for example, that when newspapers reported on how portable phones were being used to track terrorist movements, the terrorists hung up and quit using them. And a former KGB intelligence chief once told me that reading American papers and watching American TV was an essential part of his spy job, simply because free societies generate so much valuable information.
That said, the other side of the coin is also clear. The New York Times (and by the way, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, too) could report on this program only because people working on it leaked information.
There is hot talk here in the nation's capital about pursuing criminal charges against these newspapers and designing new laws to stop potential leaks from making it into the press.
So what do you think: Is the problem that these newspapers reported this secret or is it that the secret was not being kept very well in the first place?
