Tuesday, May 02, 2006

THE MARKUP

New York Times editor Bill Keller fired off an angry letter to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for daring to criticize his paper and others for collaborating with anonymous intelligence sources to expose classified national security programs. Let’s take a look at Keller’s complaint:

Your editorial posits a conspiracy between journalists and "a cabal of partisan bureaucrats" to undermine President Bush by sabotaging the war on terror. Among the suspects swept up and summarily convicted in your argument are: a) government officials who have disclosed secret doings of the government (with the exception of President Bush, whose leak-authorizing somehow escapes your notice); b) reporters and editors at the New York Times and Washington Post for reporting on these secret doings—notably the detention of terror suspects in CIA facilities in Europe and eavesdropping on Americans without warrants; and c) the Pulitzer Board, which honored both of those journalistic exploits last week.

I leave to others, including the court of public opinion, whether the government officials who spoke to reporters about secrets that troubled them were partisan evildoers, as the Journal contends, or conscientious public servants, or something more complicated. Since most of them, including the nearly a dozen who were cited in the first warrantless eavesdropping story, have not been publicly identified, it's hard to know how the Journal is so certain of their motives.

The short answer is that none of us can be certain of their motives, because while Keller reserves to himself the right to declassify government secrets, he would sooner see his reporters go to jail than reveal their secret sources to the public, much less a court of law.

The long answer is that we can, however, look at the few sources who have been publicly identified and draw some conclusions from that sample.

On the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program, we know that a man named Russ Tice has said he was one of the NYT’s sources. What do we know about Russ Tice? We know that, while in the employ of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he developed suspicions that a co-worker was a spy for the Chinese government, and that he continued to press the DIA to investigate his suspicions even after the DIA had dismissed them and transferred him to the NSA. We know that he was ordered to undertake a psychological evaluation, which found him to be psychotically paranoid, and that he was subsequently demoted and dismissed. We last heard from him in February when, after Congress finally granted one of his frequent requests to testify on the NSA’s misdeeds, he told a House committee that he couldn’t talk about the details of what he knew because the members of the committee didn’t have the proper security clearance! We also know that he now hangs out with a crowd of ex-CIA Bush critics like Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.

On the Washington Post’s terrorist detention centers, we know of a connection between reporter Dana Priest and CIA official Mary McCarthy, who was recently fired for discussing classified information with reporters after she failed multiple polygraphs and allegedly confessed. What else do we know about Mary McCarthy? We know that she donated substantial amounts of money to Democrats in 2004, including $2,000 to John Kerry and $5,000 to the DNC in Ohio. We know that she played a key role on the Clinton administration’s national security team. We know that her most vocal defenders have been ex-CIA Bush critics like Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.

So, to answer Keller’s question: No, we don’t know that all of the sources for these stories are disgruntled paranoids or partisan hacks. But what we know about the ones who have been publicly identified indicates that the Wall Street Journal editorial board probably wasn’t too far off base.

05/02 03:34 PM Share