How Now, Brown Cow?

In the wake of the New York Times' treasonous disclosure of the federal government's Swift covert terrorist finance tracking program, President Bush was "animated and visibly angered":

President Bush on Monday sharply condemned the disclosure of a secret anti-terrorism program that taps into an immense international database of confidential financial records. "The disclosure of this program is disgraceful," he said.

"For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America," Bush said. He said the disclosure of the program "makes it harder to win this war on terror." ... "Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law," Bush said, talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after meeting with groups that support U.S. troops inIraq.

"We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America," the President said. "What we were doing was the right thing."

Vice President Cheney was highly peeved as well:

"Some of the press, particularly the New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs....

"What I find most disturbing about these stories is that some of the news media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people."

Big Time followed that up with more of the same in a speech over the weekend.

Republican congressional leaders were also in high dudgeon - for the cameras and microphones, at least. But there is a very fair question to be asked now that we're ten days past this latest crippling breach in national security: what are the Republicans going to do about it?

The NSA terrorist surveillance program was a serious compromising, but that avenue is at least a technological one where adjustments can be made to recover some of the program's utility. The Swift program, by contrast, is functionally irreplaceable in no small part because it depended upon the cooperation of our allies who, now that their participation has been exposed as well, are heading for the tall grass and are considerably less likely to work with us again on anything where confidentiality is a prerequisite.

Our secret-keeping credibility could be rebuilt if legal steps were taken to plug the most garishly evident holes in our classified veil. But to do that, Congress and the Bush Administration would have to do something about which they appear unenthusiastic: move punitively against the New York Times.

Here is how it could, and should, be done:

[T]he editors of the [NYT] [should] take a look at the U.S. Criminal Code[;] they would find that they have run afoul not of the Espionage Act but of another law entirely: Section 798 of Title 18, the so-called Comint statute.

Unambiguously taking within its reach the publication of the NSA terrorist surveillance story (though arguably not the Times' more recent terrorist banking story), Section 798 reads, in part:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information . . . concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States . . . shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both [emphasis added].

This law, passed by Congress in 1950 as it was considering ways to avert a second Pearl Harbor during the Cold War, has a history that is highly germane to the present conduct of the Times. According to the 1949 Senate report accompanying its passage, the publication in the early 1930s of a book offering a detailed account of U.S. successes in breaking Japanese diplomatic codes inflicted "irreparable harm" on our security. The Japanese responded to the book's revelations by investing heavily in the construction of more secure codes. Thanks to the ensuing Japanese progress, the report concludes, the United States was unable to "decode the important Japanese military communications in the days immediately leading up to Pearl Harbor." In other words, the aerial armada that devastated our Pacific Fleet had the skies in effect cleared for it by leaks of classified information....

Wanna see a delectably ironic example of the damage Extreme Media indiscretion can do? Mr. Schoenfeld more than obliges:

During the run-up to the Iraq war, the United States was urgently attempting to assess the state of play of Saddam Hussein's program to acquire weapons of mass destruction. One of the key sources suggesting that an ambitious WMD buildup was underway was an Iraqi defector, known by the codename of Curveball, who was talking to German intelligence. But Washington remained in the dark about Curveball's true identity, and the fact that he was a serial fabricator.

Why would the Germans not identify Curveball? According to the Silberman-Robb WMD Commission report, they refused "to share crucial information with the United States because of fear of leaks." In other words, some of the blame for our mistaken intelligence about Iraq's WMD program rests with leakers and those in the media who rush to publish the leaks. [emphases added]

In still other words, President Bush did not "manipulate intelligence" in order to "mislead the country into invading Iraq," but rather he was prevented from gaining a more complete assessment of Saddam Hussein's WMD arsenal and programs because the seditious Fourth Estate fifth column can't keep its damned mouths shut. And if they won't keep their mouths shut about blithering classified national security information, it is the government's job to close their mouths for them by criminally prosecuting offening media outlets under the Comint statute.

When asked about precisely that on Rush Limbaugh's radio program a week ago, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales said it's, "...way premature to be talking about prosecution of the New York Times." Please note that the scope of the question wasn't limited to blowing the cover off the Swift program, but also included the NSA terrorist surveillance program breach. Now I understand that the Swift story only came out ten days ago, but the Times' NSA story is past six months old and counting. Just how much time must be squandered on Speedy's Hamletian dawdling before he gets off the schnied and gets Messrs. Keller, Risen, and Lichtblau frog-marched out of the Times offices in handcuffs?

Jed Babbin's reflex reaction was, "[T]he administration is going to let the NYT continue to publish anything it wants, leakers to leak anything about this war, and no secrets can be kept except by America's enemies. This makes me sick."

Jim Pinkerton put it even more baldly, wondering aloud whether "the Gray Lady has turned the President yellow":

[A]lthough the Times is open about its willingness - make that eagerness - to publish secrets in wartime, it doesn't appear that the Justice Department plans on doing anything in response. And so it's fair to ask: Does the Bush Administration have a serious plan for winning the international war on terror, or is it drifting down the path of least political resistance - and thus to defeat?....

So why hasn't the Bush Administration done anything? One answer, of course, is that the wheels of justice grind slow - and unseen, at least for a while. But a better answer comes from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who argues that the Bush Administration has been "intimidated" by the media and by allied critics in Congress. That would explain the Boston Globe story on Monday, detailing how the Bushies, who once asserted that the phone taps were perfectly legal just the way they were, are now willing to accept closer Congressional supervision. So score a[nother] media-political victory for the Times.

And so the Gray Lady has every reason to think it will win this latest battle, too. The fate of the war on terror, of course, is another story - but the Times is too busy crushing George W. Bush to worry much about that.

I don't know if it's that the Bushies have become "intimidated" or worn down by the five-and-a-half year media war against them that has been arguably much fiercer than anything the Islamists have mustered over that same period of time. I tend to think it grows more out of the President's impregnable "New Tone" philosophy that almost contemptuously eschews overt partisan combat with his political enemies - a quarter that, like the libs' obsession with showering every possible bit of legal protection upon the terrorists, is not remotely reciprocated in turn.

Jack Kelly not only wonders what Bush is afraid of, but argues that prosecuting the Times is a too-long-delayed showdown that he should relish:

Prosecuting the Times....could be good politics. Americans are, at best, ambivalent about the war in Iraq. But solid majorities support the steps the President has taken to protect us in the broader war on terror. For instance, shortly after the Times exposed the NSA intercept program, a Rasmussen poll indicated 64% of Americans supported it. Only 23% were opposed.

Ordinary Americans are furious with the Times [reportedly by a 4-1 margin even in New York City] both for what it has done, and for its arrogance in doing it. And journalists don't have much popularity to lose. In a Harris survey in March, only 14% of respondents expressed a "great deal" of confidence in the press, while 34% had "hardly any."

In picking a fight with journalists over leaks, President Bush would be picking on one of the few groups in America less popular than he is, on the issue where he is on the firmest ground with the public.

Media uproar over prosecution of the Times would drown out other issues where the President is on shakier ground. This is a fight to be welcomed, not avoided.

Dubya has never been governed by polls, of course. Political considerations have always, for him, been secondary to doing what he thinks is right, for weal or for woe. But this is an instance in which good politics and doing the right thing dovetail closer than Homer Simpson and Krispy Kremes.

Really, what has Bush, personally, got to lose? He's a lame duck. He can't run for a third term. Far from being politically debilitating, that should liberate him to do things that re-election considerations, even if they weighed against a necessary course of action (as going after the NYT would not), might otherwise deter.

Such leadership is clearly needed for Republicans on Capitol Hill, who, when it came to taking their tossed-off media comments and putting them to paper even in the form of non-binding resolutions, gave the term "craven" a whole new dimension of spinelessness:

The House resolution that will be debated tomorrow may be accompanied by blunt words in the floor debate, but its language is the language of indecision and purposelessness. It doesn't name the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, so it isn't directed at them. It is a half-measure in a time when Americans in the military are asked to give their full measure. I don't think I could vote for it.

Tomorrow's vote is instead a choice on what the House might have said and what it did say. And what it proposes to say is a half measure. It should be defeated, and the leadership should bring forward a resolution that let's its "yes" be "yes" and its "no" be "no." [emphasis added]

Majority Republicans can't even muster the courage to condemn the Times by name??? And Pinkerton thought the President was yellow. Unsurprisingly, their Senate counterparts did no better.

What an astounding political miscalculation. Why is it necessary to point out to 'Pubbies yet again that, just as nobody elected the New York Times to be the arbiter of national security secrets, it was not the New York Times that elected them to political control of the elective branches of government?

The voters who did are not happy with or impressed by the quivering reticence of their President, senators, and representatives. Recall the email roundup Michelle Malkin provided last week. Hugh Hewitt brings us more base reaction, and it isn't pretty either:

From Powerline's Lt. Colonel:

That members of Congress will vote to send troops into battle but they lack the courage to take a principled stand against the NYT and other media outlets that actively undermine our national security.

~ ~ ~

From Polipundit guest milblogger Oak Leaf, on the Hamdan ruling, a sentiment that parallels reaction to the Congressional collapse of courage:

I wasted twelve months of my life in Afghanistan for this.

Support by the military in the GWOT is going to collapse.

UPDATE: This opinion will go from a ripple to a wave throughout the uniformed military. We were slapped by John McCain last December. Today, we are slapped by the Supreme Court. This afternoon, I am removing myself from the volunteer list at Human Resources Command-St. Louis to re-deploy. I will not be the only one.

And here's more:

Initial reaction from callers and e-mails to the resolution's refusal to specify last Friday's stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times is overwhelmingly negative - a fearful refusal to confront the powerful MSM that once again insults the intelligence of voters, but especially does not convey the seriousness of the breach.

~ ~ ~

Best e-mail:

Kofi Annan must have consulted with the House. Nothing else makes sense.

Go look up the word "sardonic" in the dictionary. If you don't find that quote listed there, you soon will.

The vast majority of Americans know we're at war. The American Left and its Extreme Media propaganda axis know it but are too busy fighting their own civil war against "Jesusland" and the President it elected. The question that now sits before us is do the President and majority Republicans still know we're at war, and are they still willing to do what it takes to win if that means taking down the crown jewel of the domestic enemy's fifth column?

Because, as Mr. Schoenfeld concludes, that is precisely precisely what victory now demands:

Given the uproar a prosecution of the Times would provoke, the attorney general's cautious approach is certainly understandable. But what might look like a prudent exercise of prosecutorial discretion will, in the face of the Times' increasingly reckless behavior, send a terrible message. The Comint statute, like numerous other laws on the books limiting speech in such disparate realms as libel, privacy, and commercial activity, is fully compatible with the First Amendment. It was passed to deal with circumstances that are both dangerous and rare; the destruction of the World Trade Center and the continuing efforts by terrorists to strike again have thrust just such circumstances upon us.

If the Justice Department chooses not to prosecute the Times, its inaction will turn this statute into a dead letter. At stake here for Attorney General Gonzales to contemplate is not just the right to defend ourselves from another Pearl Harbor. Can it really be the government's position that, in the middle of a war in which we have been attacked on our own soil, the power to classify or declassify vital secrets should be taken away from elected officials acting in accord with laws set by Congress and bestowed on a private institution accountable to no one?

If George W. Bush and his party cannot answer that question with a resounding, righteously indignant "NO!", then they will have become accessories to the Times' now-serial treasons - and the President's "animated anger" will have been nothing but pointless, and hollow, posturing.

UPDATE: If Bill Keller's New York Times had been around 231 years ago....

UPDATE II: Here's what a revered Democrat president had to say on this subject.

UPDATE III: The Portland Oregonian's David Reinhardt asks Bill Keller "Who died and left you president?" The answer, it's appearing, is....the President himself.

Maybe Bush should just make it official and hand over the Oval Office keys to Keller and go back to posthole digging in Crawford. At least that way when Los Angeles gets nerve-gassed or Chicago gets irradiated, the blame would go where it truly belongs.

UPDATE IV: David Frum on the latest desperate spin of NYT defenders:

This is the emerging line of defense: The financial surveillance program was not much of a secret anyway, so national security was not compromised by the decision to reveal it. If true, that raises the question: if the program was not much of a secret, why was it considered worthy of 2000+ words on the front page?....

Here are some details from the June 23 story that you have to wonder whether the terrorists knew before:

i) The US and its allies are tracking not only bank accounts, but also information from stock exchanges and mutual fund managers.

ii) The US does not however have easy access to individual ATM transactions on American soil.

iii) Wire transfer information is not available in real time, but only after a lag of several weeks.

iv) Nor is it logistically possible to get real-time information on credit-card purchases - of, for example, fertilizer or timing devices.

v) The United Arab Emirates fully cooperates with the program.

vi) Individual member banks are growing unhappy with the program and want it to end.

Doesn't that strike you as potentially useful information - especially points iii and vi?

The Times should have the courage of its convictions. Instead of pretending that the information revealed was useless, it should forthrightly admit: Yes we may possibly have helped the terrorists - but we believe that any risks to security were more than worth it. Then we could argue that latter point. Their current line of defense is disingenuous and cowardly.

To employ another of my hoary aphorisms, "The fruit don't fall far from the tree."