Media Leaks: More Perfidity Uncovered
And the MSM hates bloggers for no apparent reason. (Well, they have their reasons, and they are far from logical.) Cruising through the blogosphere this morning I came across this post from Glenn Reynolds. His question was "DID A MEDIA LEAK kill Marines in Beirut 23 years ago?" Intriguing question, and one that takes readers to this post at Pajamas Media. That sends you to AJ Strata's site where his long winded discertation about media leaks unfolds. Towards the end of the piece, he cites a New York Times piece today that has this at the heart of it:
KATHARINE GRAHAM, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 2001, backed her editors through tense battles during the Watergate era. But in a 1986 speech, she warned that the media sometimes made “tragic” mistakes.
Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.
“This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities,” Ms. Graham said.
But such cooperation can prove problematic, as her newspaper’s former editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, has recounted.
In 1986, after holding for weeks at government request a scoop about an N.S.A. tap on a Soviet undersea communications cable, The Post learned that the Russians knew all about it already from an N.S.A. turncoat named Ronald Pelton. NBC beat The Post on its own report.
The New York Times is still trying to spin this story. They are attempting to take the public's anger away by trying (through mental gymnastics that would tie Mary Lou Retton in knots) justify their deplorable behavior. But this, included in that piece, has me asking the same question that Mr. Reynolds has.
Did a media leak kill 241 Marines in Beirut?
Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has some thoughts about it:
And was it really a “tragic mistake”? Surely the terrorists must have known we were listening in on them. That’s what our spy agencies do, after all. But what they didn’t know, evidently, is that we had broken their code (cf Enigma), and so it mattered not if they suspected we were listening to their transmissions (or their phone calls, or looking at their financial records). What matters is that they were able to pick out specifics in the report (we were listening to coded radio transmissions—which we knew to be coded, and that, given our interest in them, we either had broken the code or were at work on breaking the code), and from there, they were able to adjust. Yield: 241 dead.
Everyone understands the press has a job to do. That job is to report the news, which includes facts and information that is key to helping people understand the day's events. But there is a fine line that they walk daily. The New York Times, depite their best (is this really their best?) efforts, cannot change the fact that they have now broken two stories that deal with national security. What is more nauseating than anything is the fact that they disavow any wrongdoing. They had admitted that they were in a rush against the LA Times for this story, and did not want to be scooped. They are trying to now say that this program was known by many, many people, and it was hardly "secret." (For more on that nonsense, see Patterico's site where he blows that myth out of the water.)
This program was a secret. It was not widely reported. No details were given about it. (As Thomas has argued, we may have had a suspicion or two that the government was doing this, but we--the general public--had no "operational details" regarding it.) The New York Times switched that up two weeks ago by publishing such information. Their culpability in helping our enemies is clear. They may not have done so with that intent, but it changes nothing. Our enemies know what methods we were using to track them, and they will, are, or have changed their methods to better avoid ours.
Thank You, New York Times. I agree with Thomas: With friends like the Times, who needs enemies at all?
Marcie
And the MSM hates bloggers for no apparent reason. (Well, they have their reasons, and they are far from logical.) Cruising through the blogosphere this morning I came across this post from Glenn Reynolds. His question was "DID A MEDIA LEAK kill Marines in Beirut 23 years ago?" Intriguing question, and one that takes readers to this post at Pajamas Media. That sends you to AJ Strata's site where his long winded discertation about media leaks unfolds. Towards the end of the piece, he cites a New York Times piece today that has this at the heart of it:
KATHARINE GRAHAM, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 2001, backed her editors through tense battles during the Watergate era. But in a 1986 speech, she warned that the media sometimes made “tragic” mistakes.
Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.
“This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities,” Ms. Graham said.
But such cooperation can prove problematic, as her newspaper’s former editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, has recounted.
In 1986, after holding for weeks at government request a scoop about an N.S.A. tap on a Soviet undersea communications cable, The Post learned that the Russians knew all about it already from an N.S.A. turncoat named Ronald Pelton. NBC beat The Post on its own report.
The New York Times is still trying to spin this story. They are attempting to take the public's anger away by trying (through mental gymnastics that would tie Mary Lou Retton in knots) justify their deplorable behavior. But this, included in that piece, has me asking the same question that Mr. Reynolds has.
Did a media leak kill 241 Marines in Beirut?
Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has some thoughts about it:
And was it really a “tragic mistake”? Surely the terrorists must have known we were listening in on them. That’s what our spy agencies do, after all. But what they didn’t know, evidently, is that we had broken their code (cf Enigma), and so it mattered not if they suspected we were listening to their transmissions (or their phone calls, or looking at their financial records). What matters is that they were able to pick out specifics in the report (we were listening to coded radio transmissions—which we knew to be coded, and that, given our interest in them, we either had broken the code or were at work on breaking the code), and from there, they were able to adjust. Yield: 241 dead.
Everyone understands the press has a job to do. That job is to report the news, which includes facts and information that is key to helping people understand the day's events. But there is a fine line that they walk daily. The New York Times, depite their best (is this really their best?) efforts, cannot change the fact that they have now broken two stories that deal with national security. What is more nauseating than anything is the fact that they disavow any wrongdoing. They had admitted that they were in a rush against the LA Times for this story, and did not want to be scooped. They are trying to now say that this program was known by many, many people, and it was hardly "secret." (For more on that nonsense, see Patterico's site where he blows that myth out of the water.)
This program was a secret. It was not widely reported. No details were given about it. (As Thomas has argued, we may have had a suspicion or two that the government was doing this, but we--the general public--had no "operational details" regarding it.) The New York Times switched that up two weeks ago by publishing such information. Their culpability in helping our enemies is clear. They may not have done so with that intent, but it changes nothing. Our enemies know what methods we were using to track them, and they will, are, or have changed their methods to better avoid ours.
Thank You, New York Times. I agree with Thomas: With friends like the Times, who needs enemies at all?
Marcie
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 12:11 PM
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