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Hey, remember that USA Today article that claimed that major telecomm companies were providing massive databases of caller records to the government?
It is interesting how many members of Congress were given classified briefings, yet still spoke about those briefings in some level of detail to the paper. Yet because the legislators were coy, the paper has very partial, somewhat contradictory information -- which doesn't slow them down one bit, apparently.
We seem to go through periods every few months where getting a paper delivered around here is next to impossible. In the last five days I've gotten . . . let's see . . . zero New York Times. So I've pretty much got their phone number memorized since I'm calling it every morning for either a replacement paper or credit.
This morning there's a new recording you hear before the regular voice mail menu kicks in that tells you that if you are calling about "recent editorial content" you should hang up and call a different number that they provide. Interesting, no? It has been a full week since they published the Swift story and they're apparently still getting so many phone calls they've had to set up a separate line to handle them all.
I can't remember if I was calling the Times right at the time of the NSA story (I think our last batch of delivery problems was a bit after that) but I wonder if the same thing happened then.
Someone (probably someone updating their resume as we speak) left the audio on in the room where the Sec. of State and the Russian Foreign Minister were about to have lunch.
Result: the traveling press corps was able to transcribe their private lunch discussion. (Which, I have to admit, is fascinating.)
The reporters then wait till the hapless State department briefer briefs on the lunch before they let him know they know what actually went on.
Special.
Because, please, say what you want about the Bush administration and how it deals with the press, every administration since time began has said the exact same boilerplate about the way diplo-lunches have gone.
(But it is kind of funny.)
As far as I know, there still hasn't been a letter from the editor of the Wall St. Journal regarding their decision-making on the terror finance story, but we get a little closer today with something from their editorial side that offers some information on how they came by the story and went with what they had.
It does explain why the White House isn't complaining about their story, and they explain why they don't appreciate the Times pointing to them as fellow travelers in having decided to out Swift.
Via Memeorundam, the Canadian paper Globe and Mail has a report on an Internet chat room used by the wives of the Canadian terror suspects, and it ain't pretty people.
I wish everyone who's convinced that Islamist terrorism is a response to American policies would take a look at this, because some of the ugliest comments are reserved for Canada itself, "that filthy country," as one of the young women would only call it, the country that gave her family a place to come when they were frustrated by the conservatism and discrimation against immigrants they found in Saudi Arabia, ironically. (Her father seemed shocked by some of the comments she had posted: he had no idea of the ideas she had developed.)
They were taking a classic Salafist line, including the position that voting was unIslamic. (The argument is that in the Koran God gives man His system of Law, so when, in democracy, man tries to create laws for himself, he is actually usurping for himself that which God has taken as His role: the Lawgiver.) They were not against American democracy, they were against democracy period.
This is not about us, Americans, this about something much bigger, and everyone who wants to live a life of their own choosing had better figure that out and stand with us.
NRO's Media Blog reports on a CNN story that just stunned me when I saw it: by asserting motive, the New York Times becomes the victim of the terror finance leak story. As much as the "elite" media may believe the Times is being scapegoated for political purposes, to make that the frame of news reports without solid evidence is still quite an amazing move. And suddenly the Times is able to play their favorite role -- the poor victim, defending the people's right to know against great risk of . . . well of what exactly isn't quite clear, since there's so little chance of real negative outcome, but the more talk there is, the easier for the paper to play its role of First Amendment Martyr.
As I read this article (via Memeorandum) the BBC accepted every part of a review of its Mid-east coverage that was positive, and politely rejected every part of the report that wasn't positive, including a suggestion that it call terrorism, you know, terrorism. Ironically, their reasons were that, first, the definition excluded attacks on soldiers. (Of course, attacks on military personnel don't fit the definition of terrorism.) And second, using the word
would make "the very value judgments" the Editorial Guidelines "ask us to avoid."
Yeah, sorry, not much we can do about that. Sometimes informing your audience requires making a value judgment.
The networks are going on and on about the tribunals (re. today's Court decision), framing this as the Court says the administration "overreached," but as a non-lawyer what's got my ears perked up is that the Court is saying Geneva applies -- if that's true the implications of that are far more important and far more far-reaching.
That seems to be the reaction from the lawyers who are blogging, here are the details in full, and some people are very, very unhappy.
Tony Snow is saying the White House's reaction is that the thing is too complicated for a snap judgment.
It's not up on Google News yet, but Fox is reporting that the VA laptop with information on millions of vets, and stolen when a worker took home the info on a disc has been recovered. No telling yet if the info was tampered with at all.
Why watching Fox right now?
Because MS is in full weather disaster mode even though they have the best (for my money) Supreme Court/DOJ reporter in broadcast, Pete Williams, and the Supreme Court just handed down a major decision on Gitmo detainee rights.
It does not sound as if the Court decision involves winning one for the good guys, but of course they're trying to talk and read the decision at the same time (and I'm no lawyer either.)
I'd wait a little while then go check out some of the better law blogs, such as the venerable Volokh.
The argument in favor of publishing the story about the Swift program for tracking terrorist financing is that the public needs to be fully informed, which presumably means fully informed regarding the need to balance a possible risk to civil liberties (in this case privacy rights) versus the need to pursue a program that could help stop terrorists.
Give the devil his due, if you read the original Times story you understood fully that the risk to civil liberties was abstract while the ability to track terrorists was quite empirical.
Now, different people will make their choices based on the balancing of those comparative risks in different ways, but the Times was honest about what those comparative risks were.
If you didn't know that the programs' successes in tracking terrorists were proven, you might evaluate the competing risks quite differently, however.
