NYT's Bank Spying Story Grounds for Treason, Suggests Media Monitor

by Chad Groening and Jody Brown
June 28, 2006

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(AgapePress) - - A conservative media watchdog is blasting the New York Times for its recent article that blew the cover on a classified terrorist surveillance program in the federal government.

The NYT article revealed that the Bush administration has obtained information about terrorist suspects' financial transactions from a Belgian international banking cooperative. Times executive editor Bill Keller decided to expose the successful program despite a request from the government not to do so, citing the need for "an aggressive, independent press [to act] as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy ...."

President Bush yesterday made his first public remarks about the newspaper's decision, calling it "disgraceful." Pointing out the country is at war "with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America," the president said it "does great harm" for information to be leaked and/or published about the surveillance program. "And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror," he said.

Clay Waters is director of TimesWatch, a division of the Media Research Center (MRC), a media watchdog organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, just south of Washington, DC. Waters asserts there was no legitimate reason for the Times to publish the article. As he points out, the newspaper found nothing illegal about the operation.

"We're talking about the surveillance of international bank records," he explains. "They found nothing illegal; they only found a few people who were willing to talk about gray areas, and there just doesn't seem to be any purpose to this story. There were no civil liberties rights being allegedly violated."

Waters says he can only imagine what would have happened had the newspaper exposed U.S. surveillance operations during World War II. "I can imagine some people going down to 43rd Street with a noose -- and that's not really a metaphor," he says. "Things have changed. With freedom comes responsibility, and the Times has just been totally irresponsible with ... this bank spying thing, which does not seem to have any kind of civil liberties concern, any kind of legal concerns."

He calls the Times' decision "just some knee-jerk reaction" saying, in essence, that "Bush doesn't want this out, so we'll put it out -- no matter what the White House says and pleads that we do."

The TimesWatch spokesman says he believes the newspaper story will probably cripple the terrorist surveillance program, so he thinks the Bush administration could make a good case for prosecuting the paper. MRC founder and president L. Brent Bozell could not agree more. The Times, he says, will stop at nothing to propel its "liberal agenda."

"This most recent story should serve as a warning to Americans that the New York Times just doesn't give a d--n about American national security," says Bozell in a press release. "The Times can no longer hide behind the façade of fair and objective journalistic standards."

Continuing, the MRC leader says the newspaper is "pushing a left-wing agenda" and "putting our country at risk." Consequently, he believes the New York Times "deserves to be prosecuted for treason."

Gary Bauer

'Right to Live' a Higher Priority
Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families notes an interesting irony in the report. He points out that just two weeks after September 11, 2001, a Times editorial recommended the government initiate exactly this type of financial monitoring program. The Treasury Department, said the editorial, needed "new domestic legal weapons" in order to crack down on money laundering by terrorists.

"If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one," said the Times editorial.

Nevertheless, notes Bauer, the newspaper continues to justify its reporting of the story as a matter of "public interest." The conservative spokesman takes issue with that argument.

"[D]oes the public have any interest in being kept safe from terrorist attacks?" he asks. "Is it in the public's interest for America to defeat an enemy who will stop at nothing to see that every American dies an agonizing death?" He suggests the Times consider whether someone's "right to live" might take priority over somebody's "right to know."