Monday - June 26, 2006

Treason!

I watched the interview with King and Specter on FOX News yesterday evening and I came away thinking I wanted to smack Specter up side his pointy little head and nominate King for President. Specter mumbled on and on about “we need to wait until we get all the facts” and “premature judgement”, etc. Yes, and Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Senator.

I also had a real problem with something else Specter said - that Americans have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” with phone calls but the same didn’t apply to banking records. WHAT? This is madness! I’d prefer it the other way around if I had to choose only one. For crying out loud, I just don’t care if someone wants to know who I’ve been calling. On the other side, I sure as hell don’t think it’s anybody’s business how I spend my money.

Congressman King tried to make the point that the NY Slimes should be investigated for possible treason. I completely agree. The administration asked the Slimes not to run the story and they must have had a pretty good reason for asking or else they wouldn’t have asked. Notice the repeated use of the word “ask”? That’s because of the First Amendment, which the modern media is abusing and bending almost to the breaking point.

I dont’ want some editor at the NY Slimes, who has a Leftist agenda and a desire to replace the administration, making decisions about what national security plans should be revealed to the entire world (and the enemy, in case the Slimes forgot). For one thing that editor does not have the whole picture and has no idea what damage he or she may incur with this blatant disregard for national security.

I propose that Congress drag the editors of the NY Slimes before an investigating committee and grill the asshats to find out by what authority they assume the power to keep the terrorists overseas and in sleeper cells here in the US so well informed about attempts to track them down and bring them to justice. Personally, I don’t feel a great need to stay informed as to how the work is being done to keep me safe and alive. All I care about is that it is being done. Perhaps the NY Slimes needs to see another 3,000 dead Americans before they decide to act responsibly? I certainly hope not ...

Lawmaker Wants Feds to Probe N.Y. Times
_{Jun 25 11:04 PM US/Eastern (AP via BREITBART)}

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration on Sunday to seek criminal charges against newspapers that reported on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists.

Rep. Peter King cited The New York Times in particular for publishing a story last week that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records.

King, R-N.Y., said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging that the nation’s chief law enforcer “begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times _ the reporters, the editors and the publisher.”

“We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” King told The Associated Press. A message left Sunday with Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis was not immediately returned. King’s action was not endorsed by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

“On the basis of the newspaper article, I think it’s premature to call for a prosecution of the New York Times, just like I think it’s premature to say that the administration is entirely correct,” Specter told “Fox News Sunday.”

Stories about the money-monitoring program also appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. King said he thought investigators should examine those publications, but that the greater focus should be on The New York Times because the paper in December also disclosed a secret domestic wiretapping program. He charged that the paper was “more concerned about a left-wing elitist agenda than it is about the security of the American people.”

When the paper chose to publish the story, it quoted the executive editor, Bill Keller, as saying editors had listened closely to the government’s arguments for withholding the information, but “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.”

In a letter posted on its Internet site Sunday that the Times said was sent to people who wrote to Keller, the editor said the administration argued “in a half-hearted way” that disclosure of the program “would lead terrorists to change tactics.” But Keller wrote that the Treasury Department has “trumpeted ... that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.”

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the paper acted responsibly, both in last week’s report and in reporting last year about the wiretapping program. “It’s pretty clear to me that in this story and in the story last December that the New York Times did not act recklessly. They try to do whatever they can to take into account whatever security concerns the government has and they try to behave responsibly,” Dalglish said. “I think in years to come that this is a story American citizens are going to be glad they had, however this plays out.”

- More on the story at BREITBART ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/26/2006 at 08:20 AM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias •  
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