Quick! Somebody Call a Wah-mbulance
The above image was taken from Little Lulu’s House of Propaganda and Disinformation.
The point appears to be that the NYT is causing troop deaths by publishing stories like the one on SWIFT. When the Wall Street Journal or LA Times publishes similar stories, it’s not such a big deal. But, when the NYT does it, it really rankles. (Ron Suskind’s “One Percent Doctrine” also has a section on SWIFT. But, I’m pretty sure Malkin would like to shut him up, too, so I won’t bother using him as an example of additional entries in the public record)
Malkin’s post is even more brazenly pointless than it first appears. As Glenn Greenwald points out, what the NYT published has in the public record since December of 2002. As Glenn quotes State Department official Victor Comraes saying:
Yesterday’s New York Times Story on US monitoring of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) transactions certainly hit the street with a splash. It awoke the general public to the practice. In that sense, it was truly new news.
But reports on US monitoring of SWIFT transactions have been out there for some time. The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002. The UN Al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group , on which I served as the terrorism financing expert, learned of the practice during the course of our monitoring inquiries.
So, it’s not that this is a leak of classified or sensitive information. The issue is that no one had made it a headline before. That means the NYT has really screwed the pooch as far as terrorists who don’t pay attention are concerned. Like one of these types:
- The lazy terrorist. He doesn’t like to read, or look things up on the internet. Instead, he’ll read the headlines in the Times, and of course Doonesbury. Look, even terrorists need a chuckle now and then.
- The forgetful terrorist. He just can’t seem to remember what the government is monitoring. Is it my phone calls, my emails, my international banking transactions, or all three. For the life of me I just can’t remember. That’s why I subscribe to the New York Times.
This is little more than an ad hominem attack on the left, symbolized here through the NYT. Like Bush, Malkin understands that hate sells. Naturally, hate of people who are different from your readers. Or, if you have self-hating readers, that could work, too.
June 27th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Gonzales is especially concerned about the lazy terrorist:
June 27th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Sorry, I meant the forgetful terrorist, of course.
June 27th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
“But if they’re not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.
(LAUGHTER)”
That Gonzales says these things, would be in any other context amusing. That he says these things as Attorney General, leaves me shaking my head, wondering how historians are going to look at the last 6 years.
June 28th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Larry Johnson has a couple of posts up at the TPMCafe about this that sound pretty
much on the mark. And of course Glenn Greenwald’s response the other day gets at the
disturbing heart of this issue–the attempt to censor or otherwise intimidate the press
from reporting on the administration. BTW, either of you happen to catch the hilarious
clip at Crooks and Liars that has Bernie Ward and some right-wing flack from Texas “debating”
this issue? Ward keeps asking the right wing radio flack whether he wants government
censorship and the right wing guy just gets all upset, throws down his mike, and leaves.
Been a long time since I’d seen a liberal pundit/spokesperson as assertive as Ward. Keep it up.
June 28th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
No, I hadn’t. For some reason I don’t often look at C&L unless someone links to it. Here it is. I don’t know how anyone could expect to get a meaningful debate between two political radio hosts like that. It’s good to see an assertive liberal, and I wish him success, but I don’t think I’d enjoy listening to the guy for any length of time.