Monday, June 26, 2006
Disgraceful
Here's Press Secretary John Snow to Bill Keller and the New York Times:
Don't miss the whole thing here.
The fact that Snow - and by extension the President - made this rebuke public is a significant gesture.
But it won't be enough.
If this isn't a clear cut case for criminal prosecution for the deliberate airing of state secrets, nothing is. We have a duty to preserve and protect the integrity and potency of our national defense against foreign threats against those who act with a reckless disregard for public safety not just now, but for future administrations. If we don't stick up for ourselves now, we create a new and lower standard for the future.
Prosecute vigorously, and prosecute now.
Splash out,
Jason
UPDATE: It wasn't Tony. It was John Snow, the Treasury Secretary. I was apparently smoking crack or something.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey: When one has meetings with a Cabinet officer, his undersecretary, members of Congress, and the two chairs of the 9/11 Commission, and all of them urge the spiking of a national-security story, that cannot be described by anyone with a shred of honesty as "half-hearted". Not only has Keller revealed his arrogance, but also showed the lack of integrity that led to his decision to publish this story.
You have defended your decision to compromise this program by asserting that "terror financiers know" our methods for tracking their funds and have already moved to other methods to send money. The fact that your editors believe themselves to be qualified to assess how terrorists are moving money betrays a breathtaking arrogance and a deep misunderstanding of this program and how it works.
Don't miss the whole thing here.
The fact that Snow - and by extension the President - made this rebuke public is a significant gesture.
But it won't be enough.
If this isn't a clear cut case for criminal prosecution for the deliberate airing of state secrets, nothing is. We have a duty to preserve and protect the integrity and potency of our national defense against foreign threats against those who act with a reckless disregard for public safety not just now, but for future administrations. If we don't stick up for ourselves now, we create a new and lower standard for the future.
Prosecute vigorously, and prosecute now.
Splash out,
Jason
UPDATE: It wasn't Tony. It was John Snow, the Treasury Secretary. I was apparently smoking crack or something.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey: When one has meetings with a Cabinet officer, his undersecretary, members of Congress, and the two chairs of the 9/11 Commission, and all of them urge the spiking of a national-security story, that cannot be described by anyone with a shred of honesty as "half-hearted". Not only has Keller revealed his arrogance, but also showed the lack of integrity that led to his decision to publish this story.
Comments:
The amazing thing about this entire pseudo-scandal is the utter ignorance of the vast majority of commenters, of the degree to which financial transactions are monitored under normal regulatory practices, both to keep the markets honest and to prevent their use as a conduit for money laundering. A lot of bloggers on both sides are a pretty good example. Have they never heard of FINCEN? And, one wonders, how do they think that the SEC starts a lot of compliance reviews under rules 14 and 16? I'd submit it has something to do with the fact that *every single stock transaction* goes into a database that is regularly data mined by the government for suspicious patterns. Understanding derivatives and calls and so forth is at least a little tricky, but it stuns me that so many people presume to speak knowledgeably about the markets, but are wholly ignorant of the actual mechanics of the markets and the methods used by the markets' traffic cops, which are quite simple and the thing on which the post 1933/1934 stock market (and the international market) is based. John Cole is a pretty good example of a guy who is horrified about these terrible Bushwa abuses of power... John Cole's little spiel on this is really funny. His commenters calling for warrants, each and every time the government scrutinizes a financial transaction, are particularly hilarious.
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