The New York Times, 'Necessary Secrets' and the Mullah Omar Outrage

The Power Line blog has a post this morning on a surprising honest review in the Washington Post of the new book, Necessary Secrets. From the Power Line post:

The review is by Leonard Downie, Jr., who was the Post’s executive editor until 2008. Downie is obviously uneasy with Schoenfeld’s view that editors and reporters at the New York Times should be prosecuted and imprisoned for revealing two of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism programs – the warrantless intercept program for monitoring calls to the U.S. by foreign terrorists and the program though which the international financial transactions of terrorists were secretly tracked.

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The exposure of these programs by the fearless reporters and editors at the Times unquestionably contributed to the prolonged detention of its reporter, David Rohde, because we lost the tools for finding to a kidnap victim in the tribal areas of Pakistan. For that very reason the Times was forced to find “outside the box” options to try and gain Rohde’s freedom and apparently one of those options involved hiring civilian contractors who had contacts and access into the denied areas of the North West Frontier. Here is a quote from the first story the Times published on the subject:

From December 2008 to mid-June 2009, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Clarridge were hired to assist The New York Times in the case of David Rohde, the Times reporter who was kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reporter ultimately escaped on his own.

I doubt he escaped on his own. The Haqqanis do not seem the kind of villains who would let David walk freely around the compound to find enough rope laying right there to scale the compound walls. Nor do I think Americans can wander about the town of Miranshah for more than five minutes without being detected — but miraculously there was a patrol of Khyber Rifles to take him into custody and see him safely to Peshawar. Sounds like somebody pulled off a wicked smart operation to me.

Secrets of The Times

Many of you may not recall the kidnapping of the Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist because the Times used its considerable clout to put a complete media blackout on the event. It is too bad that the Times is unable to muster a little empathy for the Americans fighting in Afghanistan or they would not have published a piece in the Sunday edition which, by their own admission, endangers them. “U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts” is the headline but in the article the doubts are from the CIA and International man of action Robert Young Pelton about a program which is performing so well the Pentagon doesn’t want to shut it down. The CIA is supposed to run HUMINT (human intelligence) and can’t, Mr. Pelton had a contract to do something similar and failed so what is the point of the story? Look at this quote:

While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.

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Is that not all you need to know about this program to understand that maybe there are better things to focus on in Afghanistan? This article, just like the first one, said that the military is investigating to make sure no policies or procedures were violated. So what is the point? Is the New York Times now the hall monitor of record? “Teacher, teacher those boys are still producing vital intelligence and we told them to stop!” Teacher, teacher Mike Furlong just came out of the boys room and it smells like cigarette smoke!” Are you kidding me? Do these people think we are so stupid we cannot clearly see this hypocritical agenda-driven attack journalism for what it is?

Blackfive came out today with yet another report on the detention of Mullah Omar by the Pakistan ISI. Uncle Jimbo is no amateur and has many more sources for this kind of news than I do. If this story is true it is an outrage. The President of the United States has the mandate to uphold the constitution. He has no right to spin and scheme and play games where matters of nation security are in play. There is nothing for him to think about — the procedures for high value fugitives like Mullah Omar have been planned out in great detail by top legal talent like John Woo who crafted a constitutionally acceptable set of procedures so tight that even Jon Stewart could not find fault in them. He has been in office for over 18 months; if he has not written his own set of procedures he has to live with the old ones.

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This Mullah Omar story is the most important story of the day. Our government is lying to us, they are taking liberties with the postions of power the people have granted them which are not constitutional nor remotely covered by executive privilege. I want to know if this is true but our “newspaper of record” is busy carrying water for a loser CIA station chief and a failed Canadian “adventure personality.” I’ll keep my eyes glued to the Times of London, which will break this story long before our liberal, agenda-driven, state run media.

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