There's a new punchline to the old joke "what's black and white and red all over", and it's not funny at all.
The New York Times
July 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributors
When Do We Publish a Secret?
By DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times
SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk.
Terrorist lives only, most likely.
On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.
Whenever it would damage America's efforts and the Bush administration.
Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.
Nice use of the scare quotes, traitors, but I don't think that will stand up in court.
We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day.
On the wrong side.
We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers.
The term "independent newspapers" would be much better translated as "wholly owned subsidiaries of the DNC".
We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country's security.
So why are you working so hard to hand the country to those who would deny you those rights?
We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both our papers braved the collapsing towers to convey the horror to the world.
And promptly stopped showing the pictures when you realized it was hurting your cause.
We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Note to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan: Watch your back.
Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.
Correct. You are not neutral. You are on the terrorists side, as evidenced by your giving aid and comfort to them in wartime.
But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.
So, judging by your literature, why are you working so hard for them? And, since "an informed electorate" is so important, why are you working so hard to silence the opposition's views?
Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."
The press, however, was NOT protected so that it could undermine the government and endanger the people.
As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press's drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.
The government is charged with protecting its people. The press has endangered those people by aiding their enemies. So yeah, there should be a little tension there.
Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.
But you have inadvertently brought your readers information that will enable them to judge how well the press is fighting on the terrorists' behalf, and at what price.
In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.
But it has done a woefully inadequate job in bringing forth any information whatsoever of activities that could possibly portray the Bush administration in a positive light — the great progress of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the rights of women in those countries, about the abuse of hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of innocents to terrorists that are utterly enthusiastic about using torture, about beheading and raping without warrants.
As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently in the pages of that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"
Not unless they spend an equal amount of effort disclosing (and therefore damaging) terrorist operations. Obviously they won't do that, because that would be "fair and balanced" - a phrase that has lost all meaning to them.
Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes.
The press, understandably, wants it both ways. They want freedom of the press, and they want to destroy the country that guarantees that freedom.
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.
How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect?
Instinct to protect whom, exactly?
Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could be seen and used by insurgents.
They also take great care not to divulge any American successes in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could demoralize insurgents and rally support for the war they loathe.
Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.
As evidenced by Rathergate and Katrina reporting.
The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands.
They are usually copy-pasted from the AP(jazeera) wire.
They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience,
or a grudge,
but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology.
But they overcome all this with their unrelenting desire to take down a Republican administration.
They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story,
or are making it up wholecloth,
who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account.
"Taken into account" is code for "eliminate if it doesn't agree with the DNC".
We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources with different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.
Yeah, they challenge them to make up more convincing cover stories.
Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment.
Much in the same manner as, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth was given a "fair opportunity to comment" on the hyperspace bypass construction.
And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing.
, to be scheduled shortly after the story is printed.
Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.
Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.
, based on the aforementioned anti-American criteria.
When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article.
Michael Yon is helping to make more people aware of some of the articles you hold.
But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times's decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration's case for secrecy.
So "further reporting" gives them the right to "report" in the first place?!? From that we can deduce that "further shooting" gives criminals the right to start shooting...
But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material,
(Saddam's)
and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, The Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar.
Oops, they did it again.
It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.
Like whether or not agents had to dial 9 to get an outside line.
Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.
Yet strangely, in the past five years, they have not printed a single article questioning the "operational or technical aspects", "legal basis", or "issues of oversight" of the terrorists themselves.
We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence.
There you have it, editors take responsibility for treason.
It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.
But you will surrender to the terrorists if (God forbid) they win.
— DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times
Traitors.
