The New York Times: If It Will Make Americans Bleed, It Leads

The latest LWM outrage, summarized nicely by Andrew McCarthy:

Yet again, the New York Times was presented with a simple choice: help protect American national security or help al Qaeda.

Yet again, it sided with al Qaeda.

Once again, members of the American intelligence community had a simple choice: remain faithful to their oath — the solemn promise the nation requires before entrusting them with the secrets on which our safety depends — or violate that oath and place themselves and their subjective notions of propriety above the law.

Once again, honor was cast aside.

For the second time in seven months, the Times has exposed classified information about a program aimed at protecting the American people against a repeat of the September 11 attacks. On this occasion, it has company in the effort: The Los Angeles Times runs a similar, sensational story. Together, the newspapers disclose the fact that the United States has covertly developed a capability to monitor the nerve center of the international financial network in order to track the movement of funds between terrorists and their facilitators.

The effort, which the government calls the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program"(TFTP), is entirely legal. There are no conceivable constitutional violations involved. The Supreme Court held in United States v. Miller (1976) that there is no right to privacy in financial-transaction information maintained by third parties. Here, moreover, the focus is narrowed to suspected international terrorists, not Americans, and the financial transactions implicated are international, not domestic. This is not data mining, and it does not involve fishing expeditions into the financial affairs of American citizens. Indeed, few Americans even have information that is captured by the program — though there would be nothing legally offensive even if they did.

And unlike the last vital program the New York Times compromised — the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, which the same reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, exposed last December — there is not even a facially plausible concern that the TFTP violates statutory law. The provisions germane here (mainly, the Right to Financial Privacy Act that Congress enacted in 1978 in reaction to Miller) do not even apply to the nerve center at issue, the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

That's because SWIFT, as it is better known, is not a financial institution at all. It is a consortium, centered not in the U.S. but in Belgium, which simply — albeit importantly — oversees how funds are routed globally. It is a messenger, not a bank. Nevertheless, in an abundance of caution, the government uses administrative subpoenas — which were expressly provided for by Congress in the aforementioned Financial Privacy Act and the Patriot Act — when it seeks SWIFT information. That's not just legal; it's hyper-legal.

Of course, The Times has always been a strong proponent of privacy, right?

Remember that Pulitzer-prize winning series of investigative articles on the ridiculous invasion of privacy represented by the volume of information reported to the IRS? No? That's right---it doesn't exist.

Remember when the New York Times led the LWM charge to get the Palm Beach prosecutor who inappropriately sought to rifle through Rush Limbaugh's medical records? No? Because no such crusade happened.

Remember when Times editor Bill Keller held that press conference announcing he would not rest until Senator Schumer came clean about his office releasing Maryland GOP candidate Michael Steele's credit report for political opposition research? No? Your memory serves you well---it didn't happen either.

So let's sum up the Senile Gray Lady's position on privacy:

1. When privacy rights hamper the expansion of American socialism, The New York Times doesn't give a fig about privacy.

2. When privacy rights expand the ability of terrorists to murder Americans, The New York Times thinks privacy concerns trump all others.

I'm not questioning The New York Times' patriotism. I'm questioning whose side they're on in the Global War on Terror which kicked off not far from their headquarters.

Update:

Cap'n Ed channels his outrage much more powerfully and succinctly than I do:

The New York Times apparently wants to stage itself as a publication written by traitors for an audience of idiots.