[Infowarrior] - NYT Editorial: Patriotism and the Press

[Richard Forno]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/opinion/28Wed1.html?pagewanted=print
Editorial
Patriotism and the Press

Over the last year, The New York Times has twice published reports about
secret antiterrorism programs being run by the Bush administration. Both
times, critics have claimed that the paper was being unpatriotic or even
aiding the terrorists. Some have even suggested that it should be indicted
under the Espionage Act. There have been a handful of times in American
history when the government has indeed tried to prosecute journalists for
publishing things it preferred to keep quiet. None of them turned out well ‹
from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the time when the government tried to
enjoin The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon
Papers.

As most of our readers know, there is a large wall between the news and
opinion operations of this paper, and we were not part of the news side's
debates about whether to publish the latest story under contention ‹ a
report about how the government tracks international financial transfers
through a banking consortium known as Swift in an effort to pinpoint
terrorists. Bill Keller, the executive editor, spoke for the newsroom very
clearly. Our own judgments about the uproar that has ensued would be no
different if the other papers that published the story, including The Los
Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, had acted alone.

The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure
of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of
specific individuals. Terrorist groups would have had to be fairly credulous
not to suspect that they would be subject to scrutiny if they moved money
around through international wire transfers. In fact, a United Nations group
set up to monitor Al Qaeda and the Taliban after Sept. 11 recommended in
2002 that other countries should follow the United States' lead in
monitoring suspicious transactions handled by Swift. The report is public
and available on the United Nations Web site.

But any argument by the government that a story is too dangerous to publish
has to be taken seriously. There have been times in this paper's history
when editors have decided not to print something they knew. In some cases,
like the Kennedy administration's plans for the disastrous Bay of Pigs
invasion, it seems in hindsight that the editors were over-cautious.
(Certainly President Kennedy thought so.) Most recently, The Times held its
reporting about the government's secret antiterror wiretapping program for
more than a year while it weighed administration objections.

Our news colleagues work under the assumption that they should let the
people know anything important that the reporters learn, unless there is
some grave and overriding reason for withholding the information. They try
hard not to base those decisions on political calculations, like whether a
story would help or hurt the administration. It is certainly unlikely that
anyone who wanted to hurt the Bush administration politically would try to
do so by writing about the government's extensive efforts to make it
difficult for terrorists to wire large sums of money.

>From our side of the news-opinion wall, the Swift story looks like part of
an alarming pattern. Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has taken
the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned it into a
rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the
normal checks and balances of our system of government. It has created
powerful new tools of surveillance and refused, almost as a matter of
principle, to use normal procedures that would acknowledge that either
Congress or the courts have an oversight role.

The Swift program, like the wiretapping program, has been under way for
years with no restrictions except those that the executive branch chooses to
impose on itself ‹ or, in the case of Swift, that the banks themselves are
able to demand. This seems to us very much the sort of thing the other
branches of government, and the public, should be nervously aware of. We
would have been very happy if Congressman Peter King, the Long Island
Republican who has been so vocal in citing the Espionage Act, had been as
aggressive in encouraging his colleagues to do the oversight job they were
elected to do.

The United States will soon be marking the fifth anniversary of the war on
terror. The country is in this for the long haul, and the fight has to be
coupled with a commitment to individual liberties that define America's side
in the battle. A half-century ago, the country endured a long period of
amorphous, global vigilance against an enemy who was suspected of boring
from within, and history suggests that under those conditions, it is easy to
err on the side of security and secrecy. The free press has a central place
in the Constitution because it can provide information the public needs to
make things right again. Even if it runs the risk of being labeled
unpatriotic in the process.