Posted on 01/04/2006 5:46:15 AM PST by pissant
Hello, 2006. The New York Times kicked off the new year by refusing to answer its own ombudsman's questions about the timing of the newspaper's anonymous illegal leak-dependent National Security Agency monitoring story. Long live transparency and accountability.
Meanwhile, Times reporter James Risen launched his anonymous illegal leak-dependent book, "State of War," with a self-congratulatory appearance on NBC's "Today" show. Risen's leakers, he told Couric, were the opposite of the Valerie Plame case leakers because his people came forward "for the best reasons." How do we know that's true? Because Risen says it is. So there.
Risen then patted himself and his bosses on the back for their "great public service" in publishing the story (never too soon to go Pulitzer Prize-begging) and heaped more praise on his anonymous sources as "truly American patriots." Risen also told Couric that many of his law-breaking sources "came to us because they thought you have to follow the rules and you have to follow the law." Uh-huh.
Asked about the timing of the original story (held a year, then published in the midst of Senate debate over the Patriot Act and a few weeks before the release of his book), Risen said "it wasn't my decision" and refused to "discuss the internal deliberations."
In other words: Keeping secrets to protect counterterrorism operations is an impeachable offense, but keeping secrets to protect the Gray Lady's fanny is an elite media prerogative.
In his book, Risen finds evidence of sinister motives everywhere. This passage on p. 53 is typical:
"The existence of the [NSA surveillance] Program has been kept so secret that senior Bush administration officials have gone to great lengths to hide the origins of the intelligence it gathers. When the NSA finds potentially useful intelligence in the U.S.-based telecommunications switches, it is "laundered" before it is widely distributed to case officers at the CIA or special agents of the FBI, officials said. Reports are said not to identify that the intelligence came from intercepts of U.S.-based telecommunications."
Never mind that such practice, dating back to at least World War II, is routine when sources are classified.
Oblivious to the need to keep classified programs secret, Risen goes on to castigate the Bush administration for not asking Congress to publicly debate the NSA program.
He ends the book with a Cindy Sheehan-esque sermon attacking neoconservatives and the right-wing pundits who supported them, and pays tribute to the heroic "disaffected moderates," including, we presume, his law-breaking sources.
If Risen's good leak/bad leak spin sounds familiar, that's because Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was plying it this weekend on Fox News Sunday. Asked about the Justice Department criminal investigation into the NYT/NSA leaks, Schumer sputtered: "There are differences between felons and whistleblowers, and we ought to wait until the investigation occurs to decide what happened."
Schumer, as I've noted previously, has some nerve pontificating about secrets and disclosures. Guess he puts his former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee staffers, Katie Barge and Lauren Weiner, in the noble "whistleblower" category. (I checked with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., last week, by the way, and the investigation into Barge and Weiner's involvement in illegally obtaining a credit report on Maryland's Lieutenant Governor Michael S. Steele is still ongoing.)
Contrary to the one-armed Democrat plumbers' wishes, you can't just selectively plug the leaks you don't like and let the other half flood freely. The law regarding disclosures of classified information does not grant an exception based on leakers' motives. See U.S. Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 37, Section 798. Nope, no Bush Derangement Syndrome exemptions there.
In any case, we'll soon see if and how long Risen is willing to stay in jail to protect his pure and patriotic illegal leakers.
Yes, and they would not even require a cash payment. That's how much they wet-dream about seeing America lose....to anyone.
I had a similar thought yesterday. If the warrantless surveillance is inside the policy limits set by FISA, and the NYT only discloses policy, not methods or capabilities, then what's the leak?
FWIW, I think parts of the anti-terrorism surveillance are outside the policy limits set in FISA, and that is why the strong objection to public disclosure.
Prosecuted for treason, not just leaking, IMO.
And disinfected after Hillary.
And judging by how pissed GWB looked at his press conference when this came up, I'm thinking he's going to press hard on Alberto.
By your reasoning, it is legal to "leak" any covert operation that is being conducted in accordance with the law.
No. You have to take it one step further. My point is that the "covert" operation can't possibly be truly "covert" if it has been challenged and discussed at length in a court of law. The fact that 99.999% of the U.S. population had no idea this NSA program existed does not necessarily make it "covert" -- it just makes us ignorant or blissfully unaware.
The fact that one of the earliest (and unsuccessful) challenges to the NSA program involved a specific defendant (whose name is part of the U.S. Supreme Court case that he eventually lost) and a specific security-related issue tells me that there is nothing classified about what the NSA has been doing. There are mechanisms in U.S. law to deal with classified information in criminal court cases (e.g., having the case heard in a special court outside public view), and the fact that these mechanisms were not put into motion in the 1979 case is a very telling sign.
Johnny, the MSM did not care about the myriad abuses of power by the scumbag Clintons. But, boy they sure scream bloody murder about GWB doing exactly what all other war time Presidents have done -- intercept our enemies' communications.
Rosen and the MSM are traitors and need to be tried as scuh.
The leak of the NSA program was actually done before the 2004 election, and was probably intended to help defeat Bush. The CIA provided the NSA with data, and Ray McGovern and VIPs were begging CIA people to leak.
We're 'gonna need one long, f_cking gallows.
For days I've wondered how long would it take someone to shout this coast to coast.
I give up and now trust that the general public sees the hypocrisy and idiocy.
Exposing secrecy that an administration depends upon to protect the public from being nuked, etc. -- in its best judgment -- is just fine and dandy but..
Exposing secrecy that MSM employees' used to undercut the public's safety and lives is totally against the founding principles of our Nation.
To publicly state (or publish) that the FBI collects evidence in internal investigations of subversion or espionage is a, "duh," moment...a restatement of the obvious (whether or not it is widely known).
On the other hand, if in the course of say, the HANSON investigation, it had been published that, "The FBI has gathered wire, fingerprint, and video surveillance evidence against Robert HANSON," this just might have constituted a disclosure of classified information, even if it was common knowledge that, "The FBI gathers evidence in espionage investigations."
That the NSA collects signals intelligence is another, "no duh." The disclosure of their targeting criteria, methods, techniques and results for a given operation, on the other hand, is not so innocent.
bump
Bears repeating....
Believe me -- I hate to come down on the side of the NY Times in this case. But the more I read about it, the more I'm convinced that they have done nothing illegal.
It's also interesting to note that the lack of formal warrants in these cases may actually work in their favor. If you have a "target" who is not under formal indictment, is not the subject of a subpoena, and is not the subject of a search warrant, the government may not have much legal recourse if someone exposes the investigation of the target.
For example . . . tipping off motorists on the highway by flashing your headlights to warn them of a speed trap down the road does not constitute obstruction of justice in any way.
"All animals are equal, but the pigs are more equal"
Are you sure that was 1984 and not Animal Farm?
Both the Plame case and this one involve covert agencies being used as political tools against a sitting president in a time of war by people inside the agencies or the senate(thus helping our enemies along with a political party). So to me there is treason going on that needs to be rooted out, this is the real story.
The general capabilities of the NSA are public, and have been for years due to Senate hearings and court cases.
But the specifics of the capabilities, as well as the intelligence gathered, is classified and protected. One term of art in the law is "methods and procedures." An old method, for example, was a spike microphone. Disclosing the existence and/or capability enabled by a spike microphone would have been a violation.
I agree with your later conclusion, NYT is not in violation of a statute. NYT has disclosed a policy exapansion. THis does not provide any specifics relating to capability or methods for carrying out the policy.
There are mechanisms in U.S. law to deal with classified information in criminal court cases (e.g., having the case heard in a special court outside public view), and the fact that these mechanisms were not put into motion in the 1979 case is a very telling sign.
If you are thinking of the Jabara cases, some of the evidence was taken in Camera - not even provided to Jabara.
The NSA intelligence gathering operation is described sufficiently for present purposes in Halkin, 598 F.2d at 4, as follows (footnote omitted):A brief description of NSA and its functions is appropriate. NSA itself has no need for intelligence information; rather, it is a service organization which produces intelligence in response to the requirements of the Director of Central Intelligence. Intelligence Activities: Hearings Before the Select Comm. to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the U. S. Senate, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. Vol. V at 9 (1975) (Hearings). The mission of the NSA is to obtain intelligence from foreign electrical communications. Signals are acquired by many techniques. The process sweeps up enormous numbers of communications, not all of which can be reviewed by intelligence analysts. Using "watch-lists"-lists of words and phrases designed to identify communications of intelligence interest-NSA computers scan the mass of acquired communications to select those which may be of specific foreign intelligence interest. Only those likely to be of interest are printed out for further analysis, the remainder being discarded without reading or review. Intelligence analysts review each of the communications selected. The foreign intelligence derived from these signals is reported to the various agencies that have requested it (Hearings at 6). Only foreign communications are acquired, that is, communications having at least one foreign terminal (Hearings at 9).
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1550960/posts?page=35#35 <- work back from there
Interesting. If the polls were not rigged to show that Bush was losing OH, FL etc, this may have been released back then.
You're falling for the media spin (and perhaps I contributed to this in the context of this discussion re: HANSON) that this is a matter for the criminal justice system, ergo the emphasis on Fourth Amendment violations. This is a war fighting issue, plain and simple, involving military secrets and the collection of military intelligence, the fact notwithstanding that al-qaeda wears no uniforms. Had the third reich the ability to transmit instructions directly to their operatives in the continental US, do you think Eisenhower would have had his intel folks seek a warrant? The NSA is primarily a military agency staffed by military personnel, and was used in this capacity for the gathering of military intelligence.
Having said that, the classification authority in the military is the generating office, and the various classifications (FOUO/Confidential/Secret/Top Secret) are assigned based on the potential impact the unauthorized release of that information would have on the US's national security posture. While I don't have a lot of details regarding what had been leaked to the NY Slimes, I'd be comfortable, based on what I have read, in betting a considerable sum of money that they had been provided access to at least Secret level material, and most likely higher.
What if the administration wanted to leave the impression that the laws were such that terrorists could call US citizens without fear of tapping.
What if the Bush wanted terrorists to keep their guard down?
Such a policy disclosure would amount to disclosing methods.
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