Posted on 06/25/2006 7:11:37 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration on Sunday to seek criminal charges against newspapers that reported on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists.
Rep. Peter King (news, bio, voting record) cited The New York Times in particular for publishing a story last week that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records.
King, R-N.Y., said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging that the nation's chief law enforcer "begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times — the reporters, the editors and the publisher."
"We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," King told The Associated Press.
A message left Sunday with Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis was not immediately returned.
King's action was not endorsed by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania.
"On the basis of the newspaper article, I think it's premature to call for a prosecution of the New York Times, just like I think it's premature to say that the administration is entirely correct," Specter told "Fox News Sunday."
Stories about the money-monitoring program also appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. King said he thought investigators should examine those publications, but that the greater focus should be on The New York Times because the paper in December also disclosed a secret domestic wiretapping program.
He charged that the paper was "more concerned about a left-wing elitist agenda than it is about the security of the American people."
When the paper chose to publish the story, it quoted the executive editor, Bill Keller, as saying editors had listened closely to the government's arguments for withholding the information, but "remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."
In a letter printed in Sunday editions of the Times that the paper said was sent to people who wrote to Keller, the editor said the administration argued "in a half-hearted way" that disclosure of the program "would lead terrorists to change tactics."
But Keller wrote that the Treasury Department has "trumpeted ... that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash."
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the paper acted responsibly, both in last week's report and in reporting last year about the wiretapping program.
"Its pretty clear to me that in this story and in the story last December that the New York Times did not act recklessly. They try to do whatever they can to take into account whatever security concerns the government has and they try to behave responsibly, Dalglish said. "I think in years to come that this is a story American citizens are going to be glad they had, however this plays out.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Treasury officials obtained access to a vast database called Swift — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The Belgium-based database handles financial message traffic from thousands of financial institutions in more than 200 countries.
Democrats and civil libertarians are questioning whether the program violated privacy rights.
The service, which routes more than 11 million messages each day, mostly captures information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States, but it does not execute those transfers.
The service generally does not detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ATM or bank deposits. It is aimed mostly at international transfers.
Gonzales said last month that he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security. He also said the government would not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly.
In recent months, journalists have been called into court to testify as part of investigations into leaks, including the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's name.
He said the First Amendment right of a free press should not be absolute when it comes to national security.
The editors, yes, but we must never forget the skipper of the goodship "Treason", its publisher, Arthur J. Sulzberger. He needs to be squarely in the sights of any prosecutor.
It's hard to decide who to be more pi**ed off at, the NYT, the leaker, or Specter; although there is plenty of crap to go around.
Prosecute these idiots to the fullest extent of the law!!!!
Unless laws are enforced, they become dead letters.
Sadly, as things have come to pass, there is hardly anybody in the United States that believes that treason is a prosecutable offense.
It's long past time that we set that misapprehension straight. And there is no better means of doing so that to put Arthur Sulzberger (and others) in prison for multi-year terms.
Go away
The NYT was told the information was "TOP SECRET". Disclosing "TOP SECRET" information is illegal.
"I'd like Peter King to cite me the Federal law that has supposedly been violated in this case. Much as I hate to come down on the side of the NY Times under any circumstances, I think he'd have a hard time making the case that the newspaper violated any U.S. laws when the financial records in question are stored in a database in Belgium."
Well, he did cite two laws - the Espionage Act and the Communications Intelligence Act.
You got on the wrong bus.
See this article on "Leaks and the Law" by Gabriel Schoenfeld:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/385jqmfk.asp
The Communications Intelligence Act has to do with classified communications intelligence activities by the US, regardless of where records are actually stored.
I also wrote to Sen. Specter demanding that he use the power of his Committee to subpoena the Times and demand the names of its sources. He and his fellow Congressmen simply cannot continue to standly idly by while the unelected tyrants at the Times and the Washington Post usurp their authority as the proper overseers of the Executive Branch and guardians of classified information. I tried to appeal to Specter's sense of Congressional duty in defending the powers and prerogatives of Congress. I think he is more likely to ageree with this line of reasoning than with a criminal prosecution of a newspaper.
I will say this is the first time in my life I have been angry enough to write the Times and my Senator about anything. I think a lot of Americans must have reached the same conclusion this weekend, which is why Bill Keller had to release that BS letter today. We need to keep up the pressure.
Memorialized in song --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1655590/posts
Hello ??
Is anyone home ??
Probably the same group of people in government who told him/allowed him to come forward with absurd The Single Bullet Theory for the American public to swallow.
Last December, in the face of a presidential warning that they would compromise ongoing investigations of al Qaeda, the Times revealed the existence of an ultrasecret terrorist surveillance program of the National Security Agency and provided details of how it operated.
There is one very simple problem with any attempt to prosecute the New York Times for revealing this information. The existence of that "ultrasecret" NSA surveillance program was already known before the Times "revealed" it -- and was described in the formal press release issued by the U.S. Justice Department in 2003 involving the prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver from Ohio who was charged with conspiring to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and other landmarks.
I'd like someone to explain to me how the U.S. Justice Department could possibly prosecute anyone for "leaking" information under these circumstances.
What if this information was provided to the Times by a source in Belgium?
"The existence of that "ultrasecret" NSA surveillance program was already known before the Times "revealed" it -- and was described in the formal press release issued by the U.S. Justice Department in 2003 involving the prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver from Ohio who was charged with conspiring to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and other landmarks."
I'm not familiar with the formal press release issued by the U.S. Justice Department in 2003, involving the prosecution of Lyman Faris - but I would assume that the information in that press release would have been vetted and declassified; whereas the NY Times article was a very long article containing many details that were classified.
One needs to do a comparison of the 2003 press release with the New York Times article in order to answer your question. Do you have a link to that Justice Department press release?
I don't have a link to the exact press release, but there was an article on cnn.com at the time that contained a pretty thorough summary of the Justice Department's case. While the Justice Department's press release surely would have been vetted from a national security standpoint, it also contained about as much information as anyone would need -- including specific details about the surveillance of communications to Faris through an internet cafe in Karachi, Pakistan -- to determine that the U.S. government had an extensive surveillance system in place.
Okay - so we know about such programs in a general way - we've known (sort of) about Echelon - but the government keeps details about them classified. Even if the existence of such programs is generally known, the issue remains: who has the authority to declassify information, such as the details about these programs - our elected government officials or an unelected, private, unaccountable entity such as the New York Times?
I strongly suspect that the U.S. Justice Department hasn't pursued this case simply because they know damn well that they don't have a leg to stand on. A criminal case of this sort in which Exhibit #1 for the defense is a U.S. Justice Department press release would be quite a farce.
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