You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Submit your comments on this article
Home Front: WoT
Finally: Senator Accuses NY Times of Endangering U.S.
2005-12-18
A Republican senator on Saturday accused The New York Times of endangering American security to sell a book by waiting until the day of the terror-fighting Patriot Act reauthorization to report that the government has eavesdropped on people without court-approved warrants.
Cowards, sellers of national security for profit and partisan gain = traitors
"At least two senators that I heard with my own ears cited this as a reason why they decided to vote to not allow a bipartisan majority to reauthorize the Patriot Act," said Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Well, as it turns out the author of this article turned in a book three months ago and the paper, The New York Times, failed to reveal that the urgent story was tied to a book release and its sale by its author."
Pimps of whores selling out national secrets
Cornyn did not name the senators in his remarks on the Senate floor.

A call to The New York Times' Washington bureau was referred to spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, who could not be reached immediately. wonder why? - time to push
Times reporter James Risen, who wrote the story, has a book "State of WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," coming out in the next few weeks, Cornyn said.

"I think it's a crying shame ... that we find that America's safety is endangered by the potential expiration of the Patriot Act in part because a newspaper has seen fit to release on the night before the vote on the floor on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act as part of a marketing campaign for selling a book," Cornyn said.

Since October 2001, the super-secret National Security Agency has, without court-approved warrants, eavesdropped on the international phone calls and e-mails of people inside the United States. President Bush said Saturday that the White House had kept the congressional leadership informed, which a Republican lawmaker confirmed.

But several senators cited the NSA revelation as a reason to uphold a filibuster on the renewal of the expiring portions of the USA Patriot Act — the domestic anti-terrorism law enacted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — without getting additional safeguards into the law. Supporters of renewing the law failed to get 60 votes needed to break the filibuster.

Bush on Saturday also attacked the disclosure. "As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "The unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."
Democratic partisans may find satisfaction at selling our national security for partisan gain, but what's new since Loral, Gore, Buddhist Temples...traitors
The libbies at all the usual sites are calling this illegal, impeachment material, etc. They miss the bigger points in GWB's speech: that the program was vetted carefully, it was reviewed frequently, and all the proper Congressional committees and ranking members were informed and consulted both at the beginning and at periodic intervals. WaPo notes that Congressional leaders were briefed 'a dozen times'. No one said that this couldn't be done. If the program was outrageous, illegal, and a clear violation of the Constitution, the oversight committees in both the House and Senate could and should have forced the administration to shut the program down. They didn't. That tells me something.

Further, a conundrum for the NYT: if the program was illegal, and the NYT knew about it over a year ago, why not go public then? It would have been before the election. Think the NYT would sit on an illegal program just because of 'national security' the month before the election with John Frickin' Kerry just panting for a chance to nail the President? Nah, me neither.

So if the program was legal (or so close to the line that it wasn't clearly illegal), and it did advance national security, why come out with the story now? The simplest explanation I know is that the lead author has a book coming out next month, and some advance publicity never hurts. If the NYT didn't publish and the book came out, it would have lost its investment. So publish now and to hell with national security.

Has the NYT ever leaked anything that was to the benefit of national security? I don't recall such an occasion going all the way back to the Vietnam War.

The NYT has crossed a line. If outing Valerie Plame was a crime, then disclosing the existence of an active intelligence operation is a dastardly crime.

One goal of asymmetrical warfare is to encourage fractures in the powerful side. Well, the fractures have been here since before 9/11 but the GWOT has certainly clarified the sides. This goes way beyond anything the NYT and the "transnationals" did re: Vietnam. I wish I had more confidence than I do that it will be seen for what it is. IMO now is the time for every voter in this country that does not applaud them to say so, LOUDLY - to Congress, to the White House, to the media if you can get a letter to the editor published.
Posted by:Frank G

#13  I would think that each one of us should send a FAX to each of our two senators and one to the representative denouncing this traitorous behaviour by the NYT and certain Senators. We must ask them what they think about this behaviour and what they are going to do about it. We will advise them what we will do about them in the next election, depending if they have a spine or not. In business-like, respectable language, of course, this time only.
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2005-12-18 23:33  

#12  Wait for the POTUS speech tonight, and then decide if it's "money time". CWII indeed. Our reps in congress (both houses and mostly political whores) need to be reminded loudly where their butt butter comes from. If the GOP does not come out swinging over this they are dead. The MSM / Dhimmicrat / Moveon triumvirat is going to go wild sow with this. The GOP needs to counter their bluster with endictments and prosecution for crimes that are substantiated in fact as opposed to rampant BDS which is all the left has going. Time to open the Home Front for real. No waiting for 2008....get r done now.
Posted by: Rex Mundi   2005-12-18 15:45  

#11  I look forward to hearing the President's speech tonight. I expect him to follow up on his hard hitting speech of yesterday. Pelosi is a lieing bitch and the NYT is a bunch of traitorous lapdogs. .com is right, as usual. The hammer needs to come down, and hard.
Posted by: remoteman   2005-12-18 15:29  

#10  I am reminded of a line John Houseman delivered as Mr Wabash, CIA Biggie, in "Three Days of the Condor":

[Wabash talks about his entry into the US intelligence field.]
Mr. Wabash: I go even further back than that. Ten years after The Great War, as we used to call it. Before we knew enough to number them.
Higgins: You miss that kind of action, sir?
Mr. Wabash: Nope. I miss that kind of clarity.

After the 60s-70s, when this sort of half-baked angst-ridden stuporous navel-gazing hot tub tummy-rub chattering pseudo-intelligentsia was tres chic, we have come full circle. Precisely those who reveled in destroying the institutions that had saved Freedom from Nazism, are in charge of those institutions, today... And working hard for their Tranzi masters.

As dupes and stooges of Socialism, they have become the photophobic 'evil' creatures of the gray zones they once thought they were 'outing' and defeating (Danial Ellsberg, The President's Men, Church Committee, Philip Agee, et al).

Though unintended and ironic, they have brought us clarity.

Thank, Pinch, old boy, now we know whom to shoot first when CWII comes.

And come it will.
Posted by: .com   2005-12-18 14:42  

#9  Turn Dowd over to those Aussie hardboys terrorizing ladies on the beaches.
No matter how she takes it - her position couldn't help but improve.
Posted by: 3dc   2005-12-18 14:09  

#8  I propose that we stop using "New York Times" and "NYT" and start using "Sultzberger's/Robinson's NYT".

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
Chairman, The New York Times Company
Publisher, The New York Times

Janet L. Robinson
President and Chief Executive Officer,
The New York Times Company

http://www.nytco.com/press-photos5.html
Posted by: Darrell   2005-12-18 10:26  

#7  The NYT is a filthy rag whose scumbag editors promote wreckless endangerment, libel, and treason. And that's all the more disgusting when you consider that 9/11 occured on their doorstep. Anyone who subscribes is a fool.

It is one thing to Bush-bash, but it is quite another to distort the news, slant the headlines, and encourage treasonous leakers. It's about time that Bush, Cornyn, and others to start naming names of writers and editors and demanding special prosecutors to ferret out the lawbreakers.
Posted by: Darrell   2005-12-18 10:15  

#6  Did the info provided to the NYT come from NSA people, from the CIA, or some congress-critter? I am unclear on this. I am not at all, however, unclear as to my disgust and revulsion aimed squarely at the traitorous NYT and its continuing acts of perfidy. The clearly un-American activities of the NYT need to be addressed.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike   2005-12-18 10:05  

#5  Who is going to call to task the US Senate for endangering the US?
Posted by: doc   2005-12-18 09:52  

#4  What the MSM and the Democrats have done here is make it sound like thousands of ordinary people have been wiretapped. The White House has made it very clear there were only 36 persons who were wiretapped and that only because they had ties to Terrorists organizations. This wasn't the Government listening to Smith and Jones, but Mahmoud and Mahmet. SOmone needs to go to jail over this and it's not anyone in the White House. The leaker and leakee should be prosecuted.
Posted by: Deacon Blues   2005-12-18 09:51  

#3  How the Hell are we supposed to win this war-- or any war, for that matter-- with these people running around loose and undermining everything we do?

You know what? This morning, reading this article, what little was left of my "Inner Liberalhawk" finally died-- murdered by the NYT and the lying scumbags of the Democratic Party.

This is going to end in civil war.
Posted by: Dave D.   2005-12-18 09:12  

#2  What bothers me more then the Times (which bothers me a lot by the way, the publisher should be arrested)is the fact that we have people in the NSA that commited treason and will probably go unpunished.
Posted by: BillH   2005-12-18 08:41  

#1  Good re-cap Frank.
Posted by: Red Dog   2005-12-18 05:25  

00:00