COMMENTARY: All The Treason That’s Fit To Print
By Deroy MurdockScripps Howard News Service
New York, NY (SHNS) -- The most puzzling thing about the New York Times' exposure of America's counterterrorism secrets is that it has no apparent sense of self-preservation. If the Times were headquartered in, say, Bismarck, N.D., its spectacular disregard for human safety might be explained by its bet that terrorists never would hit it directly.
However, the Old Gray Lady occupies the bull's-eye on Islamic terrorists' dartboard. The Times undermines U.S. national security from offices in Manhattan just a half-block from Times Square. If Gotham ever suffered a dirty-bomb attack, densely populated, camera-filled Times Square would be the quintessential venue for a radiological blast. In that event, gamma rays would race through the thyroids of Times staffers within seconds.
Perhaps America's self-appointed "paper of record" is so self-absorbed that its morally vain editors and publishers ignore al Qaeda's 9/11 attack that killed 2,749 individuals in Manhattan. As author Ron Suskind recently reported, al Qaeda came within 45 days of unleashing a 2003 cyanide-gas assault on New York's subways that could have killed Times readers and employees.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has listed 17 potential and actual terrorist strikes on the Big Apple. These include El-Sayed Nosair's 1990 assassination of Jewish Defense League chief Meir Kahane and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (six dead; 1,040 injured). There was also the June 6 London arrest of Syed Hashmi, a New York City resident and alleged al Qaeda associate.
As the Great Satan's principal metropolis, and home to Earth's largest Jewish population outside Israel, New York holds a special place in the icy hearts of the most violent anti-Semites since Nuremberg.
Despite 16 years of thwarted and successful mass murder by Muslim fanatics in New York, the Times spurned pleas by the White House, Treasury, and even Democrats Lee Hamilton (September 11 Commission co-chair) and John Murtha (Iraq War critic and Pennsylvania congressman) to stay quiet about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. The Times' June 23 story identified the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications in Belgium, where the CIA selectively scrutinizes international bank transfers among suspected terrorists. Besides educating terrorists on U.S. surveillance techniques, the Times has painted a giant target on SWIFT's offices.
As the Times threatens 8.5 million New Yorkers, its potentially suicidal Bush hatred has devolved into reckless endangerment of Americans from coast to coast. Terrorist targets include Chicago, home of the Sears Tower -- whose possible destruction by seven accused, Miami-based, Muslim terrorists made headlines the day the Times outed the tracking program. Terrorists lately have populated Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego. The Times' moral exhibitionism jeopardizes American lives in these and other locales.
Conversely, the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency work tirelessly to connect the dots, which President Bush's critics (including the Times) slammed Bush for not doing before 9/11. Now that Washington connects the dots, the Times disconnects them.
The tracking program helped authorities capture Riduan Islamuddin (alias Hambali), the ringleader of the October 2002 Bali nightclub bombing that killed 202 innocents and injured some 300 others. The program also aided the arrest and conviction of Uzair Paracha, a Brooklyn man who tried to whisk an al Qaeda agent into America to attack Maryland.
Like its unilateral "declassification" of the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program last December, the Times spilled the beans on the tracking program even though this initiative is considered legal, congressional Democrats and Republicans were briefed on it, and no American claims to be its victim.
"The 9/11 Commission recommended that the government be robust in tracing money," Bush told reporters Monday. "And that's exactly what we're doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror."
The Justice Department should prosecute the officials who leaked the tracking program story and the Times-niks who publicized it. There is nothing funny about making it easier for al Qaeda and its allies to turn Americans into body parts. Handcuffing a few disloyal newsmen and their bureaucratic sources for aiding and comforting our wartime enemies will telegraph this message.
Average Americans should punish the Times' transgressions. Boycotting this nationally distributed paper is the easiest way to sock this snotty rag right where it smarts: in the wallet.
Meanwhile, The New York Times should adopt a new slogan: "All the treason that's fit to print."
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.