National Security Be Damned
The guiding philosophy on West 43rd Street.
by Heather Mac Donald
07/03/2006,

BY NOW IT'S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives.

The Times's latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday's front page--where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects' international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers.

The procedure for obtaining that information could not be more solicitous of privacy and the rule of law: Agents are only allowed to seek information based on intelligence tying specific individuals to al Qaeda; they must document the intelligence behind every search request and maintain an electronic record of every search; and, in an inspired civil liberties innovation that would undoubtedly garner kudos from the Times had a Democratic administration devised it, a board of independent auditors from banks reviews the subpoena requests to make sure that only terror suspects' transactions are traced. Any use of the data for criminal investigations into drug trafficking, say, or tax fraud is banned. The administration briefed congressional leaders and the 9/11 Commission about the system. the rest

Also: Investigate The New York Times Immediately

By Michael J. Gaynor

(Jun 23, 2006 ) "All the News That's Fit to Print" is the motto of The New York Times. Obviously not fit meaning proper. Fit meaning "adapted to an end or design" or "acceptable from a particular viewpoint".

It was The New York Times that deliberately disclosed last December, right after the successful Iraqi parliamentary election and right before The Patriot Act was scheduled to be extended (in an obvious attempt to deflect attention from the success and to block the extension, or at least weaken The Patriot Act), President Bush's secret terrorist surveillance program (apparently not having learned from The Washington Post that publicizing the fact that American intelligence had Osama bin Laden's cell phone number was a reprehensible exercise of journalistic judgment) and misdescribed it as a broad domestic surveillance undermining the civil liberties of Americans instead of a discrete tool used for legitimate national security purposes to thwart terrorist attacks under both the President's inherent power under the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief and post-September 11, 2001 legislation, each sufficient for the purpose. the rest