Domestic Spying

Well someone must be thinking God (or Allah) for the New York Times steadfast dedication to exposing all those legal actions being taken by the American Government to help track down terrorists. We at least know the ACLU is overjoyed.

For the life of me I can't figure out what is going on with the 'Newspaper of Record' when they continue to divulge what even they admit is 'Top Secret' intelligence and military information. In the latest two cases, with regards to the banking records and the troop deployments, even the Times can't show anything the slightest bit illegal. Of course, almost none of their leaks have really shown anything that is truly illegal. Even their strongest case for wrongdoing, the NSA wiretapping, has already been spoken on by the FISA courts, who all those who are crying foul claim should have final authority, as being well within the President's power to authorize. But what would they know, they're just the panel of judges set up to review these exact types of situations.

I think the best explanation for what is driving the Times, and other papers like them, to try and expose every covert action being done in the name of fighting terrorism comes from the Times Executive editor himself (by way of BreitBart.com):

"We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use it may be, is a matter of public interest" said Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor.

As Donald Luskin points out, Mr. Keller clearly states "the administration's access" and not the governments. And seeing the Times didn't seem to have any problems with similar (or in some cases the exact same) programs run under the Clinton Administration, and for some reason they are totally disinterested in finding the source of any leaks that cannot be tied back to an administration official (I'll let you Google the Plame non-scandal yourself), I guess the most obvious answer to why they keep doing this is simple, anything they can do to damage this Republican administration is seen as a good thing. As Ace puts it, it's essentially the MSMs attempt at blackmail, it's a 'Give us a Democratic President or else we'll tell everyone what you did last summer' kinda thing.

At some times the line separating freedom of the press from outright treason seems pretty thin. In the case of the NYTs as of late, it seems they are trying their best to jump over just it to see what the government will do. Well, if nothing else this hardline anti-Bush stance has seemed to have some affect on how the world sees the Times, just not what they were hoping for I guess.

It's time for the various government agencies to close ranks and actually start prosecuting, to the fullest extent of the law, those individuals responsible for leaking this classified information. You'd think that if a special prosecutor could be called for the outing of a 'spy', who just happened to work at CIA headquarters and whose profession has been described as one of the worst kept secrets in Washington by the several journalists who already knew her identity, even prior to her 'outing', then you'd definitely get some special independent investigations into the sources of the leaks the NYT's has been reporting on, as of late. I won't be holding my breath.

(h/t to Powerline for a lot of the above links)