Media Nation

Because I’m still thinking my way through this, I’m intrigued when I see anything calm and reasonable on the SWIFT story. From Andrew Sullivan, conservative and pro-war:

If I were Bill Keller (fat chance, I know), I probably wouldn’t publish. On the other hand, publishing it does not, it seems to me, obviously render the program ineffective. And the Malkinesque charges of treason seem a little, er, excitable.

The New York Times will publish an editorial tomorrow that contains this intriguing passage:

[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.

I couldn’t find it. Has anyone got a link? A relevant excerpt?

A reader called my attention to Jules Crittenden’s latest in the Boston Herald, in which he accuses the New York Times of treason. Obviously I disagree. It will be interesting to see whether this is the Herald’s front page tomorrow.

But you know what? I think this is where we may be heading. No one is going to charge Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller with treason, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, U.S. Rep. Peter King and others are calling for an espionage case to be brought against the paper.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz today writes on his blog: “Man, I have never seen this kind of Times-bashing before.”

I’m afraid we may just be getting started.

Not long ago I let a right-wing radio host named Gregg Jackson trash me in several lengthy rants on Media Nation’s comments section. Jackson is pushing a book called “Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies,” and no doubt he was hoping to move some product at my expense. I’ve had worse done to me. I actually offered to read his book and take the time to research and write a point-by-point refutation.

Well, this is funny. I just found out that on June 16 he trashed me again, on his own blog — and I can’t leave a comment! Apparently it’s fine to come into my house and start screaming and yelling. But when I knocked on his door, I encountered this: “Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.” I guess he was afraid of getting inundated, given that he actually got one person to reply to his attack on me. (That person disagreed with Jackson, by the way.)

As for my offer to review his book, here’s what he wrote: “Message to Dan. If you want to purchase my book you can do so by ordering it and paying for it. That’s how free market capitalism works my friend. You can pre-order on Amazon or B&N. Why would I give you a copy?”

Uh, message to Gregg. When someone offers to review your book, whether friend or foe, the proper response is to sprint to the post office and send it off post-haste. That’s how the conservative commentator Russ Smith got a copy of my book on dwarfism, “Little People,” a few years ago. Russ reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal and called it “extraordinary.” Gregg, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that’s a damn sight better than you’re going to do.

By the way, Jackson ironically titles his post on me “How to Win A Debate With a Liberal” (sic on the capitalization). Well, here are two ways: (1) Don’t let him post a comment to your blog, and (2) don’t provide him with a review copy of your book even after he promises to read it and write about it.

Gregg, my offer still stands. But I will not buy it. Nothing personal. I don’t pay for books I write about. Neither does anyone else. Get a clue — and get a grip.

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald goes after the New York Times in a big way over the financial-tracking revelations. Writing for the Weekly Standard, she begins:

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.

I’ll give her this: To my layman’s eyes, she seems to make a pretty good case that the program is legal. Mac Donald continues:

The Supreme Court has squarely held that bank records are not constitutionally protected private information. The government may obtain them without seeking a warrant from a court, because the bank depositor has already revealed his transactions to his bank — or, in the case of the present program, to a whole slew of banks that participate in the complicated international wire transfers overseen by the Belgian clearinghouse known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. To get specific information about individual terror suspects, intelligence agents prepare an administrative subpoena, which is issued after extensive internal agency review. The government does not monitor a terror suspect’s international wire transfers in real time; the records of his transactions are delivered weeks later. And Americans’ routine financial transactions, such as ATM withdrawals or domestic banking, lie completely outside of the Swift database.

This strikes me as fairly persuasive, and quite different from the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that the Times exposed last December. On the other hand, Mac Donald’s attack on the Times is so sweeping that I can’t imagine she’s all that troubled by the NSA program, either. So I don’t know.

It does seem that one of Mac Donald’s fellow-travelers on the right, the blogger Captain Ed, undermines her case against the Times at least in part by writing:

The continuing arrogance of Keller and his two reporters has damaged our national security, and in this case on a ridiculously laughable story that tells us absolutely nothing we didn’t already know in concept. They keep pretending to offer news to their readers, but instead all they do is blow our national-security programs for profit.

This is quite an odd assertion, is it not? On the one hand, the idea that this is news is “ridiculously laughable.” On the other, the Times “has damaged our national security.” Well, which is it? (Via “Today’s Blogs” on Slate, which also linked to Media Nation’s item on Times executive editor Bill Keller’s open letter.)

It seems to me that there are several crucial differences between the wiretapping and financial-tracking programs — and perhaps chief in importance is the fact that the financial program depends on subpoenas issued to SWIFT. That would appear to give this a patina of legality that’s utterly lacking from the wiretapping saga.

President Bush, naturally, is calling the Times’ behavior “disgraceful,” which is the same word he used to describe its revelation of the wiretapping program — a program that, on the face of it, violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants.

Of more interest are the comments of Senate minority leader Harry Reid, who, unlike the president, demonstrates an ability to distinguish between the two programs. A Reid spokesman tells the Times that Reid believes the SWIFT program “does not appear to be based on the same shaky and discredited legal analysis the vice president and his allies invoked to underpin the NSA domestic spying program.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., wants to prosecute the Times, and U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., wants to investigate the White House.

All is murk.

There is much good in New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s letter to readers explaining why the Times decided to publish details of the anti-terrorism program that tracks financial transactions. More than anything, the mere fact that he believes journalists must explain themselves to the public shows the how deeply the notion of transparency has taken root.

Still, three aspects of his letter strike me as odd. I’ll take them one at a time.

1. Consider how Keller begins his second paragraph:

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government’s anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that’s the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.) [My emphasis.]

Did Keller let anyone edit this? It was the Times and other news organizations that revealed the existence and the details of this program — not angry bloggers and pundits. For Keller to try to toss the blame back into the laps of his critics suggests that he himself was pretty angry when he sat down to write. Unseemly.

2. Later on, Keller pulls an old trope out of his hat:

Our default position — our job — is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate, and our biggest failures have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. [My emphasis.]

This is accurate but not true. On the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Times published a front-page story, above the fold, reporting that U.S.-trained Cuban exiles were prepared to invade their homeland at any time. Two details were omitted, neither of which the Times’ editors could be sure about: the role of the CIA and the date of the invasion. (Of course, if the date had been published, the White House simply would have changed it.)

At first Kennedy was furious. But some time later, after the invasion had ended in disaster, he did indeed voice his now-famous regret that the Times hadn’t published all it knew, thus creating a media myth that has endured to this day. Keller, of all people, should know that.

3. Finally, Keller writes:

It’s worth mentioning that the reporters and editors responsible for this story live in two places — New York and the Washington area — that are tragically established targets for terrorist violence. The question of preventing terror is not abstract to us.

Huh? It seems here that he’s trying to say we shouldn’t question his motives because, if there’s a terrorist attack, Times people might be among the victims. Well, gee. So would a lot of other folks.

Sorry to nitpick. I actually find Keller’s argument for publishing fairly compelling. He’s especially persuasive in making the point that SWIFT, the international consortium that administers the data, will continue to cooperate as long as the operation is legal (and shouldn’t if it isn’t), and that the terrorists have long been on notice that we are doing everything we can to track their finances.

But it would have been that much stronger without the self-pitying touches and the ahistorical take on the Bay of Pigs.

You don’t need a subpoena to get the senior senator from Pennsylvania talking. From today’s New York Times:

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said that in one strategy session Mr. Bush told the senator he could not be identified as publicly supporting the Senate bill, which sought to tighten border control but also give illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens after paying fines. “Don’t quote me, Arlen,” Mr. Specter recalled the president saying, implying that Mr. Bush had spoken approvingly of the bill.

Pretty sleazy behavior, I’d say. Good thing Specter isn’t a journalist.

How does David Ortiz do it? Why does anyone pitch to him when the game’s on the line — even with Manny on deck? Unbelievable.

I honestly don’t know what to think about this week’s revelation that the Bush administration has been tracking international financial transactions. My first thought was that it seems less abusive than the secret NSA no-warrant wiretapping program, but that there’s much we don’t know. A few observations:

• Surely the terrorists already knew they were being wiretapped. The Bush administration’s only wrinkle with the NSA program was in breaking U.S. law. The financial program, though, strikes me as potentially something that the terrorists didn’t know about. Consequently, I find myself wondering whether the New York Times and other news organizations exercised good judgment by revealing it.
• Financial privacy does not seem to be all that firmly established, and has apparently not been recognized by the Supreme Court — although Congress did pass a law protecting it. Thus it appears that, once again, the White House broke the law when it didn’t really have to.
• The financial program may have actually led to the capture of a significant Al Qaeda terrorist, which is more — a lot more — than can be said for the indiscriminate NSA program.

Given my handwringing, I was interested to see The Opinionator point (sub. req.) to this post at Homeland Security Watch. After making some of the same points I was thinking about, security analyst Christian Beckner writes:

Based on the content of the story, I’m glad that this program exists — and although I usually err on the side of openness and disclosure, this is one program that I would’ve been fine to see remained cloaked in secrecy. This story could cause would-be terror financiers to rethink their money movement activities; and if SWIFT [the international consortium supplying the data] were to pull back from cooperation with the US government because of any controversy generated by this story (it’s still too early to judge the political fallout from it, if any), then that would be a real shame.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has shown such contempt for civil liberties that it’s possible we can no longer recognize a proper exercise of government authority when we see it. And yes, it’s also possible that the newly revealed program is a lot more abusive of ordinary citizens than it appears at first glance. (Surely the foolishness in Miami can’t be overlooked when assessing the White House’s motives and competence.)

For the moment, we should all learn as much as we can and not get too far out in front of this.

Good grief.

There’s an upside and a downside to the fact that space on the Web is essentially limitless. It’s great that a news site like NYTimes.com can be used to upload supplemental material such as audio, video, extra photos and original documents. But it’s not so great when someone decides that a tightly edited story in the print edition can undergo gasification on the Web.

To wit: This morning I was reading the online edition of the Times — ostensibly the print analogue — when I came across a disclaimer that accompanied a story about a video made just before a deadly protest last May in Uzbekistan: “This is an expanded version of the article that appeared in the print edition.”

Sure enough. I copied and pasted the online version into Microsoft Word, and it clocked in at 3,750 words. According to LexisNexis, the print version is just 2,949 words.

Extra stuff for those with the time and interest to peruse it is great. But please, let me read the basic story without having to plow through an extra 800 words.