Loosen those nooses

Those treason charges against Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seem to have burned themselves out pretty quickly. More than anything, I don’t think the New York Times-bashers could overcome this op-ed piece in last Friday’s Times by terrorism experts Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey. Under the headline “A Secret the Terrorists Already Knew,” they wrote:

Administration officials made the same kinds of complaints about news media accounts of electronic surveillance. They want the public to believe that it had not already occurred to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored and his international bank transfers subject to scrutiny. How gullible does the administration take the American citizenry to be?

Terrorists have for many years employed nontraditional communications and money transfers — including the ancient Middle Eastern hawala system, involving couriers and a loosely linked network of money brokers — precisely because they assume that international calls, e-mail and banking are monitored not only by the United States but by Britain, France, Israel, Russia and even many third-world countries.

While this was not news to terrorists, it may, it appears, have been news to some Americans, including some in Congress. But should the press really be called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with prosecution by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already assumed?

The next day, Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet and Keller, the New York Times executive editor, wrote an op-ed that was published in both of their papers. (The L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal broke the story around the same time as the N.Y. Times, but haven’t paid nearly as high a political price.) It’s a well-considered, well-reasoned argument for going to press. They noted that the papers have withheld information that could genuinely damage national security, and also that government officials sometimes want sensitive information revealed when they think it will make them look good. I like this passage in particular:

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department’s efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary’s team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration’s relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

The Baquet-Keller piece was an improvement over Keller’s earlier solo effort, which made some good points but was marred by a defensive, somewhat whiny tone. My colleague Stephen Burgard, director of Northeastern’s School of Journalism and a former L.A. Timesman, argues that Keller’s first piece panders to the N.Y. Times’ base, whereas the second succeeds in reaching out to a broader constituency. Burgard writes:

Whatever these Americans may think of a particular president, they of course will want the government to succeed, and will think about press decision-making along a spectrum of what might or might not cause real harm. In such an instance, where the perceived interests of the government and a free press are in collision, the readership for the editor is no longer restricted to the regular readers and detractors. The real audience is in fact the entire nation.

So will Rep. Peter King, Sen. Jim Bunning and their ilk stop taking noose measurements long enough to think seriously about what has happened? Probably not. But if bringing espionage charges against the media was ever on the table, it’s certainly off now.

I do think the New York Times made one significant mistake: By presenting the financial-tracking story as a blockbuster, it appeared to be blowing the cover on a valuable, and, it would appear, entirely legal program.

Whatever misgivings folks might have had about the Times’ earlier exposure of the NSA’s no-warrant wiretapping program, it was hard to scream “Treason!” when the White House was so obviously breaking the law. The Times couldn’t fall back on that this time. Instead, it should have made it clear that this was not new information — rather, it was an in-depth look at how the White House was following through on a promise it had made within weeks of the Sept. 11 attacks.