Editor’s note and mea culpa: This post has been revised to reflect
the fact that it is much easier than I had thought to gain access to
the opinion piece in question. Sorry for being so stupid. I had known
this, but I had forgotten.
There was a fascinating editorial in the WSJ Friday about the NYT‘s decision to publish info regarding our operations against terrorist financing, and the WSJ‘s decision to run a similar story the same day, and the difference between the two. A salient paragraph:
President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for
revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself
in the First Amendment, the public’s right to know and even The Wall
Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same
day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So
allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within
the larger context of a newspaper’s obligations during wartime.
This editorial ran two columns wide all the way to the bottom of the edit page. Here’s a link to it. Let me know whether you have any trouble getting to it, and I’ll be glad to e-mail you a slightly different link that gets you to the same piece.
I’ve already e-mailed it to my colleagues on the editorial board, so we can discuss it at our Wednesday meeting. I just thought it would be good to have a parallel discussion on the blog.
Related Posts
If you were less lazy, and had some integrity, you might have take the trouble to learn about the view of the matter taken by the Wall Street Journal news division, which is vastly different in outlook from the Wall Street Journal editorial division. Here’s what John Harwood of the WSJ news division had to say about the editorial on Meet the Press yesterday:
********************************************
MR. HARWOOD: Secondly, there is a very large gap between the ideological outlook and philosophy of The New York Times editorial page and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There is not a large ideological gap between the news staffs of those two places, and why would there be? Some of the top people of The New York Times were hired from The Wall Street Journal. What I found shocking about the editorial was the assertion that The New York Times did not act in good faith in making that judgment. I don’t know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that. I certainly don’t.
********************************************
Basically, the WSJ and the New York Times published EXACTLY THE SAME information, but because the WSJ editorial page is an ideological ally of the Bush administration, the various Bush administration officials and their apologists did not attack the WSJ, even though the WSJ published the EXACT SAME information.
To apologists for the Bush administration, the information that is published isn’t important, and whether the information harms America isn’t important; what is important is whether the entity that publishes the information is an apologist for the Bush administration.
A Wall Street Journal editorial isn’t a good place to go for a comparison of the Wall Street Journal news article and the New York Times article. Analysis is best performed by comparing the ACTUAL WSJ article and the NYT article.
Please email me a copy. Thanks.
Now, without having read the article, my take on these stories has been, “If the New York Times can obtain this information, are we really naive enough to believe Al Queda can’t?” If the information was obtained through sources in the government without using any illegal methods, then it should be the sources who are punished, not the NYT (or any other paper). I’m more concerned that our intelligence organizations can’t seem to keep these programs secret.
It would also be naive to assume that there isn’t a pipeline of controlled leaks of information from the White House to “friendly” media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Fox News, etc.
You got it, Doug.
As for Mary — and I know I’m feeding trolls here — it seems I’m lazy because I don’t sit on my butt watching television. Go figure.
Also, I wouldn’t have learned anything from it. So the news and editorial people look at the world differently. Big whoop. Let’s hope so.
What’s interesting to me — and maybe this is just because it’s a sort of inside baseball that is very relevant to my daily worklife — is the way the WSJ editorial board chose to wrestle with that difference, and the conclusions that they reached, and how they chose to play those conclusions. That’s what interested me, not all that hate-Bush/love-Bush partisan garbage. That’s why I shared it via e-mail with the editor who heads our news division, and with our publisher, who supervises both that editor and me. It makes for an interesting case study.
The full editorial is available free right here. No need to bother Brad, unless you just want to say hello.
Boy, do I feel stupid… and, uh, lazy.
Thanks, LexWolf, my trusted comrade in the never-ending fight to protect the planet from the scourge of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
And Lizards.
After reading the article, I sensed an underlying tone of moral superiority mixed in with the natural competition that would exist between the second and third largest newspapers in the country. Wasn’t it just the slightest bit “slimy” that the White House brought the WSJ into the picture specifically to counter the NYT story? Why didn’t they just put Tony Snow out in front of all the media at the same time?
I’m as much in favor of a free press as anyone you’ll ever meet. However, with that freedom needs to come some responsibility and accountability. When you have an unelected, and unaccountable to the public, editor overriding several administration officials and even the co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission, all of whom urged him not to publish, there is something clearly wrong. Clearly the hubris that comes before the fall. Or in this case, during the fall, as the NYT’s readership in its NY core market has been slipping at a rapid clip, to the point that it has fallen to #2 in NYC.
It used to be that there were 2 tests journalists used in determining whether a national security story should be published. (1) is it news?
(2) does it harm our national security?
In this case, the second test clearly wasn’t even considered or, if it was, the NYT obviously doesn’t care about the rest of the country.
It’s settled case law (Pentagon Papers) that the press has a right to print even classified information. However, that same case law also makes it clear that after such publication, the people involved can be prosecuted under relevant espionage statutes.
This is now at least the third time in recent months that the NYT has published classified information and caused grave harm to the security of all of us. In the first 2 cases there was at least some question about the legality of the program. In this case there is no such question at all. There was absolutely no need to publish this stuff (and 4 years ago even the NYT urged such a program be established). The only motivation for publication, as is the motivation for most of the NYT’s stories, was to harm Bush. Apparently they couldn’t care less if it increases the terrorist threat at the same time.
I’m rather ambivalent about prosecuting the NYT. Although it would richly deserve such a prosecution for its traitorous actions, I would hate to set a precedent like that. I have no problem, however, with putting the relevant NYT people in front of a grand jury and questioning them about the identities of the leakers in government. If they refuse to reveal that information, then send them to the hoosegow just like Judy Miller. If it’s OK to do that in a case that had no bearing at all on our national security, then a case like this is just crying out for tough action.
The leakers are the ones who should bear the full brunt of any legal consequences. Who do these people think they are, to place their personal preferences over that of the American people who elected the Bush administration? When they signed that secrecy agreement or took an oath not to reveal classified information, surely there was no little phrase in there saying “…but only if I agree with the policy or the administration”. Those traitors need to be fired and thrown in jail. Far from being the heroes they probably imagine themselves to be, they are harming all of us and need to be stopped one way or another.
There is so much to criticize about that editorial I hardly know where to start.
But I’ll bet the WSJ’s reporters are cringing in embarrassment about stuff like this:
Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times,
Translation: “Our guess is that Treasury felt Mr. Simpson could be counted on to report the story in a light more favorable to the Administration.”
What’s interesting to me — and maybe this is just because it’s a sort of inside baseball that is very relevant to my daily worklife — is the way the WSJ editorial board chose to wrestle with that difference,
What wrestling? The administration provided the WSJ with declassified info, and the WSJ printed it.
From the editorial itself: However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn’t mind seeing in print. If this was a “leak,” it was entirely authorized.
Sure doesn’t sound like they had to engage in any agonizing internal debate over whether to print the stuff . . . they just printed it.
KC,
thank you for so eloquently demonstrating why the Left simply cannot be trusted with national security. Far from being all about this administration, this story really is about the utter contempt the Left feels for the rest of us.
This is about the national security of this country, not whether the story hurts Bush. By all means, attack Bush on domestic policies and whatever, but leave national security alone. In their blind zeal to harm Bush by any means available, the Left is harming all of us.
Ummmm….KC! Time to use your noggin a little. Do you really think that those government officials would have provided the WSJ with material if they hadn’t known that the NYT would be publishing within hours? Can’t you even see that those officials were simply trying to make the best out of a bad situation? They wouldn’t have talked to the WSJ without the NYT story hanging over their heads.
Lex, do you not find what the administration did to be hypocritical in the least? They could at least have kept a shred of credibility had they not declassified the material themselves in an attempt to control the media. Then they could at least feign true contempt towards the press, rather than this BS posturing that they do.
The “top secret” program had a website and newsletter that are available to the general public. WTF?
Ummmm….KC! Time to use your noggin a little. Do you really think that those government officials would have provided the WSJ with material if they hadn’t known that the NYT would be publishing within hours?
I’m well aware that’s what the administration is saying, LW. But you missed my point. My post was about the WSJ’s decision to publish, and my point was that the WSJ didn’t have to engage in any difficult balancing test when deciding whether to publish the info, because it was just publishing what the administration wanted it to publish.
Oh, I got your point quite well, KC. However, it’s utterly besides the real point. That real point is that we wouldn’t even be talking about the WSJ now if the NYT hadn’t taken it upon themselves to ignore the administration, the two chairmen of the 9/11 commission and at least 2 members of Congress. That’s the real point: how a bunch of unelected jornalists is placing itself above our elected government and indeed above the law.
kc, the “wrestling” was the delicate matter of the editorial board commenting on something its newsroom had done.
I guess most folks wouldn’t fully appreciate that, but they were in a bind. They were in the position of commenting on a decision into which they had no input (and into which they SHOULD have no input, since it was about news), but which reflected upon the institution that they speak for.
That’s far, far trickier than you might imagine.
It’s almost the case, as Mary Rosh asserts, that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal published the same information. The impetus for publication was the former’s decision to publish. That caused Treasury to disclose greater detail to the latter’s reporter who’d been sniffing around the case.
As for the relative political position of the two newspapers, let’s accept that their staffs generally reside in New York and enjoy the enlightened attitudes common amongst the elites of that city.
While they decry the growing loss of civil liberties during the Bush administration, they support their mayor’s jihad against smoking indoors and out. They ostensibly support capitalism as they jockey for rent-controlled apartments. Their view of the First Amendment is absolutist and support the city’s probably unconstitutional gun control while they decry the shall-carry concealed weapons laws prevalent in the majority of the sane states.
They long for a more reasoned approach to the war on terror, even though the previous administration was at times most unreasonable. The New York Times held off publishing for one additional day so that Treasury could extract its personnel from Belgium, probably because they feared that they’d be arrested.
We’re left without a proven capability that had snared at least one really bad guy. I fail to see how the disclosure of this legal program benefited anyone other than al Qaeda. Who died and left the NYT’s Bill Keller in charge?
The New York Times, April 17, 1775
Keith Olberman nails Bush on at least eight separate occasions announcing to the the world press (and listening terrorists) that we’re going after their bank transactions.
Yeah, it was sensitive, secret info, alright.
Combined with the Tora Bora fiasco, Bush’s cavalier reaction to the 8/6/2001 PDB, and the CIA’s analysis of OBL’s 10/2004 audio tape cited in Susskind’s new book, a rational person might think that Bush and OBL have a mutually beneficial relationship.
As Keller says, this brouhaha is just red meat for the Rethuglican base.
Countdown with Keith Olberman, 6/29/06
The only problem, SWIFT is about as clandestine a banking organization as Wachovia. Exhibit A, any terrorist with an Internet connection able to access SWIFT‘s own Web site, no password needed, no secret handshake required. On the site, SWIFT perfectly willing to let everyone know what it is doing.
Quote, “Cooperating in the global fight against abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.”
Exhibit B, SWIFT, the magazine, called “Dialogue.” It is the voice of the SWIFT community, it says.
Finally, exhibit C, the most perplexing voice of all, the president himself, who has never made a secret of his desire to secretly track down terrorists by secretly following the secret money.
1. BUSH (September 24, 2001): Today we have launched a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network.
2. BUSH (April 19, 2004): See, part of the way to make sure that we catch terrorists is, we chase money trails.
3. BUSH (November 7, 2001): From the mountains of Afghanistan to the bank accounts of terrorist organizes…
4. BUSH (December 20, 2001): We‘re running down our money trails, the assets of more than 150 known terrorists, their organizations, and their bankers have been frozen by the United States.
5. BUSH (November 25, 2002): We‘re tracking terrorist activity, we‘re freezing terrorist finances, we‘re disrupting terrorist plots.
6. BUSH (October 10, 2001): The American people must understand that we‘re making great progress in other fronts, that we‘re halting their money.
7. BUSH (March 23, 2004)): We‘ve got a strong network of cooperative governments trying to chase down terrorist money and prevent that money from being spread around to cause harm.
8. BUSH (December 4, 2001): Message is this, those who do business with terror will do no business with the United States or anywhere else the United States can reach.
I said “…a rational person might think that Bush and OBL have a mutually beneficial relationship.”
I really meant “an observant person.”
Of course, Brad wouldn’t fall into this group.
Brad, you should really delegate paying attention to anything related to Iraq if you’re going to continue to support the endless commitment of our troops to be killed and maimed. Maybe McClatchey will spring for an intern.
New York Times, June 5, 1944
RTH –
Olberman merely continues to show how little he knows. It was widely known that the US was after terrorist financial information, but the precise methods, mechanisms, and successes were not known until the New York Times insisted on publishing those details. Few probably knew even the elements of a SWIFT transaction.
Until that event, bad guys moving money probably assumed that few countries were participating in the effort, but found out that even the stinking Belgians were lending a hand. Yes, even the sprouts in Brussels were engaged! Now that the European Commission has gotten involved with managing SWIFT information, there will be no more successes.
As the public learns of each success, the capability that led to that success becomes useless. “In today’s terror-stricken world, which is more vital to the public’s interest: being safe, or being informed?” asks an American Thinker.
I mentioned a similar example in one entry n my blog. The Soviets knew that the US had an active signals intelligence (SIGINT) capability targeted against them. They and their surrogates targeted SIGINT systems and personnel in an effort to find out how successful we were. Thanks to a reporter, the Soviets got the goods on one extraordinarily valuable program, our successful intercepts of telephone conversations from limousines used by members of the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. That source ended abruptly. Incidentally, that disclosure also led to the decades-long microwave bombardment of the US Embassy in Moscow.
Olberman is an adept Monday-morning quarterback for those who don’t know the game. Those who do have some sense of the game find him obnoxious and ill-informed, in short, an idiot.
We’ve gotten to the point where those like the New York Times editorial board who have difficulty separating politics from prudent government action actively work to expose prudent government action to promote their political goals. This is an amazing and dangerous turn of events.
Putting on my goggles on and eliminating the political smoke (and mirrors), I honestly fail to see what was ‘exposed’ by this article.
The U.S. Government has for years been monitoring fiancial transactions (drug war)and certainly this was no surprise to anyone paying the slightest attention to world news.
This is all too mch like Tattle Tail Tit
The NY Times and other liberals have sought to distort the use of SWIFT financial data as an extension to their bogus scandal of “domestic spying”, which never occurred.
Al Qaeda theoretically could have known about SWIFT without help from the NY Times, but it is doubtful, given the fact that the NY Times, with all its resources, only recently learned about it.
If the Times were truly worried about financial privacy, they would have supported the WSJ and Congress in their efforts to expose and end Bill Clinton’s illegal wiretaps on the domestic financial transactions of 6,000,000 Americans who were not suspects or persons of interest in any criminal investigations.
Banks have a responsibility to expose possible illegal activities to law enforcement, as well as a selfish motive to protect their industry. The Times has ignored the largest bank robbery in history in their backyard, the weekend wire 1999 transfers of $10,000,000,000 of IMF money to Russia by associates of Putin and Chernomyrdin, friends of Al Gore. This money financed Putin’s election, and probably some other candidates around the globe. No one has been prosecuted, because Bill Clinton and Janet Reno reigned in the FBI and Treasury agents.
Jonah Goldberg’s Column Is Curiously Redacted
Editorial page editors at the McClatchy Co.-owned Minneapolis Star-Tribune removed king-sized hunks of syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg’s recent column about New York Times, et al. revealing national secrets and compromising national security, during the war on terror.
That the Star-Tribune runs the Goldberg column periodically on its op-ed page is a bit of a surprise, although other more or less conservative writers appear there, too— e.g., Will, Charen and May, amid the parade of Dowds, Ivins and Krugmans. Perhaps Goldberg’s sometime finding ink is a token to break the monotony of mostly leftist palaver? His nifty column on the New York Times’ latest sins runs on July 3 under the title, “Liberals undermine the nation and the war.” You’ll find it here but registration is required.
What this newspaper did to Goldberg’s column in the editing process is a case study in how editorial people omit cogent information that might clash with their own political views. Another reason, if one were to speculate on why the clever editing, is that liberal gatekeepers seek to protect their fellow liberals, and their megaphone, mainstream media, from bright, coherent conservative criticism. In any event, what Star-Tribune editorial editors did to Goldberg’s column is revealing as heck. Read on to see how egregious they’ve become.
CLICK HERE for the rest of the column.
Not being a member of the third estate I probably have little to say on this subject. But it is obvious that the administration goes after the NYT because it is a “symboloic liberal rag.” Didn’t the LA Times also disclose the same info. As to the breach of security, I can’t beleive this administration can complain about any security leaks. Just like all politicians they leak when they want )i.e. Plame,etc.) need to. Nov. is a problem for the Republican party so lets go after the NYT.
kc, the “wrestling” was the delicate matter of the editorial board commenting on something its newsroom had done.
OK, thanks for clearing that up. I misunderstood – I thought you were referring to the decision to publish in the first place. I see from your new post that the editorial page staff wouldn’t even be involved in that decision.
Whatever happened to Mark Whittington?
MikeC:
I find your comments completely unconvincing. Everyone and his brother (including the terrorists and their Saudi financiers) has known for three years that the administration was tracking funds.
As RTH points out, the admin has been boasting of it for years. It’s just disingenuous in the extreme to claim that the NYT story made a dime’s worth of difference. Moreover, not one of the admin’s defenders has offered a convincing explanation of how, if this story was so damaging, its FURTHER dissemination (by leaking it to the WSJ) was supposed to mitigate the damage in any way. All it did was call more attention to the story.
This just reeks of election year politics, attacking the press (esp. the hated NYT) to get the GOP base riled up about the “traitors” in our midst..
Obviously it’s working.
Oh, by the way, welcome back. 😉
Spencer, Mark posted just a few days or a week ago. He is out trying to bring down capitalism in the USA so that keeps him pretty busy.
Because Keller Says So
The elite media knows better than anyone.
By Jonah Goldberg
According to America’s leading journalists, the United States government cannot run clandestine operations. Indeed, it cannot keep secrets or do anything in secret — if the press thinks “the people” should know about it. I put “the people” in quotation marks because for the press, it seems, “the people” are an abstraction. It needn’t matter that the public understands some things should be kept secret; the press will tell them for their own good. And if the people complain, well, that means they’re a bunch of yahoos and yokels who don’t understand what a free press is for. Or, if the people are angry, it’s solely because cynical conservative partisans in Washington are pulling their strings in a ploy to change the subject from their own failures.
Indeed, if you listened to the college of cardinals appearing Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, these are the only plausible explanations for criticism of the press for its disclosure of the government’s terrorist banking surveillance program. Apparently, the producers couldn’t find a single reporter from within the ranks of the elite-media guild who is troubled by the guild’s ever-expanding agenda to make itself the final authority on what can or cannot be secret. The Wall Street Journal’s John Harwood, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, the New York Times’s Bill Safire and the guest immoderator, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, refused to even consider the possibility that some critics are, you know, serious when they criticize the press. Bill Bennett was there for “balance” but received nothing but scorn for raising issues of “right and wrong.”
In fact, Harwood and Safire were in complete agreement that expecting journalists to abide by secrecy laws is a “big step toward tyranny,” in Harwood’s words. Safire asked coyly: “Who elected the media to determine what should be secret and what should not?” He then answered his own question: “… the Founding Fathers did.”
So, since serious people understand that holding the press accountable is tyrannical, the only plausible motive for criticism is Republican chicanery or flyover-state yahooism. CLICK HERE for the rest of the KC smackdown.
Hey, MikeC, ever heard of “hawala?”
I hadn’t until I started reading articles similar to this article in TIME . Note the date: Friday, Oct. 05, 2001.
Terrorists don’t even need to know of the existence of SWIFT. All they need to know is that they have to use alternative means to move money. Bush told them at least EIGHT times. There were various other “hints” that I found just by googling around– like press releases from various government agencies.
So who benefited from keeping from the American people the indiscriminate and unchecked nature of Bush’s massive tracking of financial transactions?
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that the executive branch had blackmailed politicians– or spied on political opponents.
RTH,
you have no idea how glad I am that we have adults in charge of our national defense instead of your type!
The CIA leaker witch was fired a few months ago. Let’s ratchet it up, after they get their lie detector tests, to a 20 year prison term, with no parole, for first offense. The CIA was loaded up with leftists during the Clinton era, many of them civil service hires, who are under protection. But there should be no protection from breaking the law.
You said it Dave. When does GWB go on trial?
BIG LIE: “Everyone knew the FBI was tracking financial transactions, so the New York Times did no wrong to publicize it.”
They why did they publicize what “everyone knew”?
Why did it take the Times years to learn about what “everyone knew”?
The suspects located and arrested from their international funds transfers obviously didn’t know about it.
Just ask yourself, what was the motive of the New York Times in alerting terrorists to surveillance of their financial transactions?
Secret, Not Secret; Secret, Not Secret
The New York Times undertook to blow what it called, in its headline, the “secret” international terrorist financing tracking program, for reasons that it never has been able to explain. Initially, there was no doubt about the fact that the Times was exposing a secret; reporter Eric Lichtblau used that word to describe the SWIFT program something like twelve times in the body of the Times’ article. But when the Times unexpectedly found itself under heavy criticism for damaging national security, it took the nearest port in a storm, and claimed that the SWIFT program wasn’t a secret after all. Everyone knew about it! Which, of course, left people scratching their heads over the story’s page one, above the fold placement.
It turns out, though, that there was at least one guy who didn’t know about the SWIFT program–Eric Lichtblau. In November 2005, as noted this morning by Villainous Company, Lichtblau himself authored an article in the Times titled, “U.S. Lacks Strategy to Curb Terror Funds.” In that article, Lichtblau, obviously unaware of the SWIFT program, wrote that progress in identifying sources of terrorist funding had been poor, and that the administration:
is now developing a program to gain access to and track potentially hundreds of millions of international bank transfers into the United States.
But experts in the field say the results have been spotty, with few clear dents in Al Qaeda’s ability to move money and finance terrorist attacks.
Apparently those “experts in the field” didn’t know about the SWIFT program either, even though it had been going on for years, as Lichtblau later reported, nor did they evidently know about its role in capturing the most wanted terrorist in Southeast Asia, Hambali.
So much for the “everybody knew about it” defense. Note, too, what it says about the editorial policies of the Times: if the administration allegedly lacks a strategy, it should be criticized for that. If it turns out that it had a strategy all along, and the strategy was a successful one, then the administration should be criticized for keeping it a secret.
If Lichtblau had an ounce of integrity or self-respect, he would resign in disgrace, along with Bill Keller and Pinch Sulzberger.
SOURCE
Everyone is missing the big point here. Where did the WSJ, the LAT and, yes the NYT get their information about SWIFT? If this was indeed a top secret project, (a claim I find a bit suspect given the president’s repeated assertions about tracking terrorist money) the person or persons who leaked the information are the true bad guys here, not the newspapers.
As an aside, why are conservatives focusing on the so-called liberal NY Times? The conservative Wall Street Journal printed much of the same information. Aren’t they just as guilty?
“Everyone is missing the big point here. Where did the WSJ, the LAT and, yes the NYT get their information about SWIFT? If this was indeed a top secret project, (a claim I find a bit suspect given the president’s repeated assertions about tracking terrorist money) the person or persons who leaked the information are the true bad guys here, not the newspapers.”
Are you sure, Bud? Everyone? Obviously you didn’t read my earlier commenton this thread, Jul 3, 2006 12:16:15 PM:
“The leakers are the ones who should bear the full brunt of any legal consequences. Who do these people think they are, to place their personal preferences over that of the American people who elected the Bush administration? When they signed that secrecy agreement or took an oath not to reveal classified information, surely there was no little phrase in there saying “…but only if I agree with the policy or the administration”. Those traitors need to be fired and thrown in jail. Far from being the heroes they probably imagine themselves to be, they are harming all of us and need to be stopped one way or another.”
Fortunately there are some recent indications that these traitors will indeed be held accounatble!
“As an aside, why are conservatives focusing on the so-called liberal NY Times? The conservative Wall Street Journal printed much of the same information. Aren’t they just as guilty?”
Not at all. The WSJ wouldn’t have been briefed by the administration, and thus wouldn’t have published, if the NYT hadn’t been first. Surely you know that once the secret is out, it doesn’t matter who else repeats it. It’s the first one to reveal who bears the blame.
However, if the WSJ had been first to publish, I would be all over their case as well. In fact, I would cancel my subscription as my admittedly small way to punish them for their treason. Fortunately they had better sense than the NYT.