My initial reaction to the uproar over the NY Times breaking the story was to only pay partial attention to the issue– after all, certain wings of the blogosphere are angry about something every 2-3 days anyway, and the right wing is always eager to attack the NY Times (I like Glenn Reynolds, and he, more than anyone else other than me, made this blog successful with his repeated links. Having said that, I don’t think the Instapundit has ever gone more than a few days without linking to a bunch of people frothing about how the MSM in general and the NY Times in particular suck, hate America, and are ‘on the other side.’).
In short, I wasn’t really that interested. As far as I am concerned, collectively, the right wing of the blogosphere is the ‘boy who called traitor.’ Not a week goes by when I hear that so and so should be ostracized because they are a treasonous rat, they are a commie symp, whatever. I am jaded, and the pile-ons are old. So I cheered when Bill Keller wrote a snotty rejoinder. I don’t take many of the people mad at the NY Times seriously anymore, so I figured, why should the NY Times?
In addition to those feelings, I have also watched the same wing of the blogosphere defend away any and every excess committed by this administration. “Just a few bad apples” is a term that is forever soiled, and whenever I hear it from here on out I will instantly suspect something worse than it appears is going on. This gang has also seemed rather blase about individual liberty and individual rights, and simultaneously cheered almost every intrusion by the government into my personal matters, phone records, etc., because, you know, THE TERRORISTS WANT TO KILL US ALL.
Add it all up, and sum in my own personal revulsion towards the nanny state and big government, my deep personal distrust for this administration, and I initially really had no problem with the Times breaking the story. I still am not very sure where I stand on the issue, but as I read some of the more level-headed members of the right, I think perhaps maybe this time their might be some room for thinking the Times did something wrong:
But there is a significant difference between information being “out there,” as in “available in a single bureaucratically worded paragraph in an obscure U.N. report,” and between being “out there,” as in splashed all over the front pages of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
But ultimately, the key issue isn’t whether I knew about Swift, or whether Roger L. Simon knew about Swift, or even whether you knew about Swift. The question is whether the terrorists knew about Swift.
And we don’t have to speculate about this. The undeniable fact is that they didn’t all know.
I hate to keep getting back to the facts, but sometimes it seems necessary. So, let’s reprise. The program’s most salient success was the capture of Hambali, the mastermind of the deadly 2002 Bali bombing. Counterterrorism Blog says the Swift information was “out there” in an obscure U.N. report in December 2002. So Hambali must have been captured before then, right?
Nope. Hambali was arrested on August 12, 2003.
But surely the program’s successes end there, correct?
Again, back to the pesky facts. The Wall Street Journal article (no link available) tells us another success story resulting from the program:
People familiar with the program said, for example, that it yielded useful information on the bombings last July 7 in London.
Last July 7? As in July 7, 2005?
I still don’t know where I stand on all this, because for me, at least, the facts of the case are buried deep underneath layers of hubris, outrage, and sheer political opportunism. While the snide-o-sphere may think this is an instance of right-wing overreach, I am less sure about that today than I was just a few days ago. While this administration and her lapdogs have used the war on terror to basically do whatever the hell they want for five years, and in many cases have greatly overstated threats in order to get their way, it is a truth that there are terrorists who do want to kill us, and the government does have an obligation to use whatever legal means necessary to protect the citizenry. Whether or not this program was legal and whether or not this damaged our attempts to defend ourselves remains to be seen, and I am unsure how I feel about all this.