Hewitt Blog

The New York Times refuses to rest on its Pulitzer, but instead publishes details of yet another classified program.

There is no small irony that this disclosure comes within the same news cycle as the arrests of the home grown al Qaeda cell in Miami. Has the Times broken one scoop on the activities of terrorists within the U.S.?

Let's also note that the Times is not alone in sharing recognition for this achievement:

Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The New York Times on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

Would that any of the 20 had been harder at work finding sleepers or WMDs or translating Saddam's documents.

How odd that most Americans think sleeper cells and buried WMDs in Iraq present more of a threat than the Administration's surveillance of the banking activities of terrorists.

Supreme Judge of All Things Bill Keller spoke from on high in the Times' story, and took no questions:

Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Bill Keller. The real decider-in-chief.

Will he ever have the guts to grant an interview to any critic of his paper's reckless practices?

UPDATE: The U.S. military captures another senior al Qaeda operative in Iraq.

Not that the New York Times will be interested. Bill Keller would rather know how the military found him so his paper could publish the details. Those would be, after all, "a matter of public interest."

Updates:

Strata-Sphere on Keller's comments: "What a crock."

Powerline: You don't think the Times would blow a program that has actually led to the apprehension of terrorists abroad and at home? Think again.

From a FreeRepublic thread:

"Achmed?"

"Yes Khalid?"

"Did you see the New York Times report on how the infidels are tracking our money?"

"Yes Khalid. I sent a courier with a note to the financier, and he wrote back and assured me that he will route the transfers through a firm in the Bahamas and have the money laundered."

"That is good Achmed."

"It is easy. The infidel newspapers do all the hard work. All I have to do is sit here and write out notes."

"Achmed?"

"Yes Khalid?"

"How come you just don't call the financier?"

"Oh - that! Because the New York Times revealed that the infidels were monitoring our phone calls."

"Damn those infidels!"

"Thank Allah for the New York Times Khalid. Without them we'd have no secrets that weren't known to the infidels."

"Praise Allah for the New York Times."

"Indeed, praise Allah for the New York Times."

And from Michelle Malkin, contact info for the New York Times:

Send a letter to the editor by e-mailing letters@nytimes.com or faxing (212)556-3622. Snail mail:

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Michelle writes:

I'm getting inundated with furious readers' letters to the Times, most of which the editors won't bother to read or publish--since they're not in, you know, the "public (Pulitzer) interest." So I'm reprinting a representative sample here and I'll keep adding to it.

Instapundit:

What's interesting to me is that when you talk about military force, we're supposed to use law-enforcement and intelligence methods instead. But if you use law-enforcement and intelligence methods, people shout "Big Brother" and the Times runs stories exposing them.

And keep checking NationalReview's MediaBlog throughout the day.

Finally, I check the Poynter Institute to see how the guild's flagship is reacting, and find this hilarious lead-in to a story:

Two dozen smart and experienced people who actually run newspapers were here at Poynter recently for a conference about the future of news.

From Lileks:

Quote in today’s paper: “The world’s least free place for making movies is the US, because it has a fixed model.”

Ang Lee. Ang Lee. So how’s that Saudi distribution deal for “Brokeback” going, eh?

The New York Times refuses to rest on its Pulitzer, but instead publishes details of yet another classified program.

There is no small irony that this disclosure comes within the same news cycle as the arrests of the home grown al Qaeda cell in Miami. Has the Times broken one scoop on the activities of terrorists within the U.S.?

Let's also note that the Times is not alone in sharing recognition for this achievement:

Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The New York Times on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

Would that any of the 20 had been harder at work finding sleepers or WMDs or translating Saddam's documents.

How odd that most Americans think sleeper cells and buried WMDs in Iraq present more of a threat than the Administration's surveillance of the banking activities of terrorists.

Supreme Judge of All Things Bill Keller spoke from on high in the Times' story, and took no questions:

Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Bill Keller. The real decider-in-chief.

Will he ever have the guts to grant an interview to any critic of his paper's reckless practices?

UPDATE: The U.S. military captures another senior al Qaeda operative in Iraq.

Not that the New York Times will be interested. Bill Keller would rather know how the military found him so his paper could publish the details. Those would be, after all, "a matter of public interest."

In from the Cold has much more.

From today's press conference:

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, there has been a lot made on Capitol Hill about these chemical weapons that were found and may be quite old. But do you a real concern of these weapons from Saddam's past perhaps havingan impact on U.S. troops who are on the ground in Iraq right now?

RUMSFELD : Certainly. What has been announced is accurate, that
there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it's dangerous to our forces, and it's a
concern.

So obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them,
it is important that we do so. And they are dangerous. Anyone -- I'm
sure General Casey or anyone else in that country would be concerned if they got in the wrong hands.

They are weapons of mass destruction . They are harmful to human
beings. And they have been found. And that had not been by Saddam
Hussein, as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his
weapons . And they are still being found and discovered.

A fine line-up of guests on this day when the Democrats announced --again-- that they cannot be trusted with the national security.

They simply are not serious about the war, and they do not understand the enemy.

For a review of serious people and the way they approach the national security from before the Founding all the way through the early Wilson Adminsitration, pick up Bill Bennett's new book, America, The Last Hest Hope, Volume I.

Do yourself a favor and add Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack to the same Amazon.com order.

And here's a link to my new Townhall.com column, which will appear most Thursdays.

Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote for Carl Levin's Mini-Me Kerry Resolution.

There's a reason why the NRSC is lagging in its fundraising in this cycle, and his name is Chafee. GOP donors won't and shouldn't give to a general fund that is helping support his re-election.

Help Steve Laffey retire Licoln.

Be sure to take the time to read the comments on the original Kos attack on The New Republic, as well as on the two TNR posts at The Plank, here and here.

It is clear that the Democratic Party now is burdened with a second mad monk, and this one far more destructive than Michael Moore though not nearly as visible. The Kos cadre is far more energized by the prospect of bringing down Lieberman and now The New Republic than in beating Republicans. They are also perfecting a tone of shrill vulgarity combined with absolutist arrogance guaranteed to marginalize any political figure who adopts it, or is even too closely associated with it.

UPDATE: TruthLaidBear has more.

Kos goes Life of Brian on The New Republic.

Now, does Kos' line about the magazine's "Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners" get close to whispering "the Jooos did it"?

DailyKos is home to anti-Semitic cartoons after all.

Yesterday I posted on Kos' refusal to repudiate his disgusting "screw them" comment and the absurd defense he offered of it. Today's outburst is another marker on his road to irrelevance. Whether Democratic Party leaders want to follow him there is up to them, but they should be on record about his post today.

UPDATE: Baseball Crank comments:

Now, there's nothing sinister about having a non-public discussion group - I belong to two such groups, one just for the RedState contributors and a more random, open one run by Jon Henke of Qand) and including a bunch of mostly conservative and libertarian blogs. But it really is revealing of the minset at work here that anyone would even try to get not only bloggers but journalists to not write on a story. Trust me, the idea that you could get, say, Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, Jeff Goldstein, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Krempasky, Ed Morrisey and John Hinderaker to agree on a single approach to a story or, more particularly, to not touch a story - the idea that you would even broach that topic across a list of the top conservative and libertarian blogs - is inconceivable. Despite the Online Left's insistence that conservative bloggers march in unison on an agenda handed down by Karl Rove, it's apparently the lefties who are the ones seeking to enforce message discipline behind the scenes.

Clearly Rove told BC to write that.

Here's the WaPo report on the statements made by Senator Santorum yesterday:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said.

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

This story appears on page 10. There is no story in the New York Times, and the Boston Globe allots two paragraphs:

To counter criticism that no weapons of mass destruction turned up in Iraq even though that was a key argument for going to war, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., released a newly declassified military intelligence report. It said that coalition forces had found 500 munitions in Iraq that contained degraded sarin or mustard nerve agents, produced before the 1991 Gulf War.

Democrats downplayed the intelligence report, saying that a lengthy 2005 report from the top U.S. weapons inspector contemplated that such munitions would be found. A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the weapons were not considered likely to be dangerous because of their age.

Note that the "intelligence officials" in the Post story and the "defense official" in the Globe account are saying different things, and that the account in the Post --one cache that had been forgotten-- differs from the description given by Senator Santorum, and does not explain why the report itself cannot be declassified.

If it was one cache of old and useless weapons, buried and forgotten, then the intelligence agency that insists on the classification of the report is not competent.

If the report has different information than that provided the Post, then the paper and its brothers are blinkered by an anti-war ideology from asking the sort of questions such allegations as those made by Senator Santorum would oridnarily prompt.