Bill Keller, Super Genius!

I am not at all impressed with Bill Keller’s defense of printing the SWIFT-monitoring story. I think he’s not only severely wrong about what the First Amendment actually does, but he’s also more than a bit arrogant about the role he, as a member of the press, actually plays in an ongoing war.

I want to start with his opening.

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government’s anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that’s the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

Well, one of those folks would be me.

To answer him I would make two points. First, it’s ridiculous to say that drawing attention to the story by criticizing Keller is tantamount to printing the story in the first place. Keller either does not understand exactly how widely-read his newspaper is around the world, or he’s just playing dumb to make a snarky point. I’m going to go with the latter here.

Keller has let the cow out of the barn. To then say that the people criticizing him are letting the cow more out of the barn is just plain silly. Keller printed the story and the terrorists and anyone else interested in knowing one of our most secret secrets already has the information. What Keller wants to do is to try to deflect the criticism that is deservedly coming his way.

It’s an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. Who are the editors of The New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications that also ran the banking story) to disregard the wishes of the President and his appointees? And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy, and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish.

Weeeeeeeeeellll….no.

The founders did not give freedom to “the press”. They gave freedom to the people. All of the people and certainly not just Bill Keller. Let me turn his question around on him. Who are the editors of the New York Times to disregard the wishes of the people who elected the President to be, among other things, Commander-in-Chief? In other words, who elected Bill Keller to be Revealer-in-Chief? Keller has no system of checks and balances. He has no one overseeing him to ensure that his actions comport with the Constitution and the best interest of national security.

All he has watching over him is a group of individuals, whose only recourse when he abuses his position and his power, is to criticize him in any venue we can find. Keller seems to have missed that as he casually shrugs aside his critics so he can deliver a lecture to us on the First Amendment as if we had never read it before.

Let me explain something to Mr. Keller. You, sir, are no different from me in what power of the press the Constitution allows you. Your position as editor of the New York Times grants you no additional responsibility nor additional security than it does me, the author of a piddly little blog that, on a good day, might get 150 readers. The founders of this great nation saw fit to give us exactly the same freedom to publish and distribute our writing and the same responsibilities to use that freedom wisely and with respect. If you can possibly read the First Amendment and find in those words where you and your newspaper-publishing brethren are allowed to be the arbiters of What the Public Should Know, then you’re reading a different Constitution than the one that is the law of our land. As you said, “Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it’s the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements”.

What Keller did was to place himself above the President, to say that the founders granted him a position of power inside the governmental process to act as the final veto on the President’s power to wage war. That is clearly not his role, no matter how condescendingly he attempt to lecture us that it is.

Now, onward to national security.

Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress.

Well, wait. When Keller says “our government”, he means the Bush administration. I thought I’d make that clear, since he seems to be saying that when “our government” launched these programs, they should have briefed Congress, which is also “our government”. But, overlooking this accidental placing of Congress outside of “our government”, there’s a big hole in this paragraph.

Hole Number One: What the administration has contended, since Keller printed the stories, is that the programs did not require any more authorizing legislation beyond the authorization Congress already gave the President. In other words, Congress already authorized the programs that required authorization (because some of those programs, like the banking program, required no authorization from Congress at all). Keller ignores that completely.

Hole Number Two: What, exactly, is the point of having a super-secret program if you then reveal its full existence to 535 other people, most of whom are not cleared to receive such information? Why, it would be like the President taking all the details of these classified, ongoing, wartime programs right to Mr. Keller’s desk and asking him to print them, in the interest of “full briefing”! Of course, that’s what Keller really wants – to be an actual part of the government instead of one of the citizen rabble – but that’s not the way it works. The White House did, in fact, brief members of Congress from both parties on every classified program it’s run since 9/11. Not one member it ever briefed raised a substantive objection to the programs. Not one of them question the legality of the programs nor demanded that the programs be brought to the full Congress. As it happens, the members of Congress who were briefed were quite satisfied that programs were not only fully legal, but also very necessary to fighting the war that Congress itself has authorized the President to fight.

Correcting those two issues, though, would put Keller in an awkward position. Then, he would not only be elevating himself above one elected official, but 535 others. Then, Keller would have to explain to us why he, the unelected, unaccountable, unsupervised editor of the largest newspaper in the United States, was better capable of deciding when a classified program, in the middle of a war, was worthy of remaining classified better than those the people of this country actually elected to make that determination.

That would not only make him supremely arrogant, but at least as ignorant of the Constitution as he suggest that we are.

Keller then goes on to address the administration’s argument.

The Administration case for holding the story had two parts, roughly speaking: first that the program is good — that it is legal, that there are safeguards against abuse of privacy, and that it has been valuable in deterring and prosecuting terrorists. And, second, that exposing this program would put its usefulness at risk.

That’s a pretty good summation. How does he address the first point?

It’s not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective…

What?!? Of course its his job to pass judgement! Its legality and effectiveness is absolutely critical to the decision of whether to print the story or not. In fact, legality and effectiveness are the only two things Keller should have considered before he printed the story. The banking program is, his later doubt aside, entirely legal and demonstrably effective. The only reason Keller printed the story is because it was secret and he doesn’t believe that, using his own judgement and only his own judgement, the government should have any secrets, even while fighting a war.

But that’s not his decision, no matter how many times he swaddles himself in the First Amendment.

Here’s my largest problem with Keller’s defense. He spent very little time dealing with the real point of all the criticism – that in the absence of any actual evidence of government abuse or illegality, Keller revealed information that has allowed our enemy to more effectively hide their movement and tactics in the middle of a war – and a whole lot of time lecturing us about how noble and smart he was. In fact, the entire issue of terrorism barely registers in his apology at all. What he’s doing is creating a series of made-up threats and ignoring the actual one.

That might be fine if he’s writing an academic paper, but he’s not. He’s running one of the largest newspapers in the world and he just told us that he is smarter and more powerful than our government or any of us and that he’ll publish what he darned-well pleases no matter what any President asks of him.

That, folks is not only arrogant and foolish, it’s dangerous to every last one of us.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire and Hugh Hewitt also have excellent posts about this letter, making some of the same points I did, and a couple others I didn’t. Make sure to read their thoughts as well.

UPDATE 2: Treasury Secretary John Snow sent a letter to Bill Keller. Let’s say that Keller wasn’t completely forthcoming in his editorial.

Your charge that our efforts to convince The New York Times not to publish were “half-hearted” is incorrect and offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the past two months, Treasury has engaged in a vigorous dialogue with the Times – from the reporters writing the story to the D.C. Bureau Chief and all the way up to you. It should also be noted that the co-chairmen of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission, Governor Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton, met in person or placed calls to the very highest levels of the Times urging the paper not to publish the story. Members of Congress, senior U.S. Government officials and well-respected legal authorities from both sides of the aisle also asked the paper not to publish or supported the legality and validity of the program.

Indeed, I invited you to my office for the explicit purpose of talking you out of publishing this story. And there was nothing “half-hearted” about that effort. I told you about the true value of the program in defeating terrorism and sought to impress upon you the harm that would occur from its disclosure. I stressed that the program is grounded on solid legal footing, had many built-in safeguards, and has been extremely valuable in the war against terror. Additionally, Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey met with the reporters and your senior editors to answer countless questions, laying out the legal framework and diligently outlining the multiple safeguards and protections that are in place.

Oh, and he notes Keller’s particular arrogance as well. But who hasn’t?

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media.