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. |
|