All The Secrets That Are Fit To Print

This should make your blood boil. The New York Times, which editorialized incessantly about the Bush Administration’s supposed disregard for the covert identity of Valerie Plame, has printed the details of another highly-classified CIA operation.

The famed Times columnist Seymour Hersh just wrote a piece in which he attempted to make a case that the Bush Administration is more dangerous wounded and is intent on attacking Iran because, as he assumes, what does Bush have to lose now since he is so intent on destroying the world? In the midst of his utter useless rambling, he writes the following paragraph to help prove his point:

“In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan. The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran. I was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as “part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.” (The Pentagon has established covert relationships with Kurdish, Azeri, and Baluchi tribesmen, and has encouraged their efforts to undermine the regime’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran.)”

The only way a “Pentagon Consultant” would be aware of such a covert-funded operation would be to have a high enough security clearance to make him aware of so-called “Black Budget” CIA programs that are so sensitive as to be compartmentalized. Even Members of Congress and key staff would only be given portions of these facts, so secret is the nature of such programs.

This means three things: first, the person leaking this information to Hersh is guilty of violating his security clearance and may face charges such as treason or espionage. Second, it also means Hersh is not in possession of all the facts due to the sensitive nature and compartmentalization of the operation. Finally, good reporters are supposed to have corroborating facts from others with similar knowledge. In this case, Hersh merely reports what he heard from one source and then writes later that the entire program was denied by an Israeli “spokesman.” This is less than corroborating evidence and does not pass the smell test of anything more than someone going to The Times with stories of Big Foot.

What we have here is one person, for whatever reason, telling a reporter about a covert operation and, with no real fact-checking, it ends up in the New York Times. If the story is true, it blows a potential CIA program and puts dozens if not hundreds of lives in danger. If not true, it further destabilizes the crumbling relationship with Iran. Either way, it appears that Hersh did not break a sweat to weigh the potential damage to national security versus what constitutes news at The Times.

I have lost track of the number of instances The Times has printed sensitive or classified information. They were the first to write about the CIA prisons used to interrogate and determine the intentions of not very nice people (winning a Pulitzer for this story, by the way). They wrote about the SWIFT tracking of terrorist financing, rendering useless a valuable method of connecting the monetary dots between various groups intent on killing American civilians, many of them in The Times' circulation area. The Times was also the first to publish stories about the warrantless surveillance of telephone conversations between suspected terrorists and those living in the U.S., again blowing a valuable counter-measure to hear what likely bad people were planning to do to Americans and other international targets.

We can argue the merits or even constitutional basis for all the leaked programs, but these debates should be done in private and deliberated by Members of Congress or judges with appropriate security clearances. They should not be leaked to the press by those with their own agenda and certainly the publishers should have enough sense to consider the danger in exposing top secret programs.

There is, of course, a free press and the rights of free speech. However, if The Times continues to do the journalistic equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater, they may become the poster child for curtailed press rights and, in the end, this could become the legacy of The Times.