The On Point radio show on WBUR public radio in
Boston (no liberal leaning there!) featured host Anthony Brooks and several panelists chewing over the NYT's bank spy story, including reporter Eric Lichtblau, the reporter responsible (or should we say irresponsible) for coauthoring the piece.

Joining Brooks by phone, Lichtblau offered this lame defense in response to a question from fellow guest Heather Mac Donald, who wrote critically about the Times' report for the Weekly Standard: “The idea that we’re alerting terrorist to the idea that their finances may be tracked I think is misguided. I think they’ve been alerted to that for the last four-and-a-half years by President Bush and by numerous aides, including former Treasury Secretary Snow and others. That drumbeat has been constant from the administration, and it’s such a poorly kept secret, if you can call it even that.”

Terror Alert: Severe Risk of Hype

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, June 27, 2006; A21

It is the sheerest luck, I know, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales looks (to me) a bit like Jerry Mahoney, because he fulfills the same function for the Bush administration that the dummy did for the ventriloquist Paul Winchell. At risk to his reputation and the mocking he must get when he comes home at night, Gonzales will call virtually anyone an al-Qaeda-type terrorist. He did that last week in announcing the arrest of seven inferred (it's the strongest word I can use) terrorists. I thought I saw Dick Cheney moving his lips.

The seven were indicted on charges that they wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI bureau in Miami. The arrests came in the nick of time, since all that prevented mass murder, mayhem and an incessant crawl at the bottom of our TV screens was the lack of explosives, weapons or vehicles. The alleged conspirators did have boots, which were supplied by an FBI informant. Maybe the devil does wear Prada.

Why we ran the bank storyBy Dean Baquet
DEAN BAQUET is the editor of the Los Angeles Times.

June 27, 2006

MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing.

They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response.

The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly. We considered very seriously the government's assertion that these disclosures could cause difficulties for counterterrorism programs. And we weighed that assertion against the fact that there is an intense and ongoing public debate about whether surveillance programs like these pose a serious threat to civil liberties.

Since the New York Times is now the organization that decides what national security information deserves to be kept secret, Bob Cox wonders if they can be trusted with such a huge responsibility.

It comes down to a matter of trust, something in short supply for most Americans when it comes to The New York Times. Since Sept. 11, The Times has published fabricated quotations (Maureen Dowd), fabricated datelines (Rick Bragg) and stories manufactured out of whole cloth (Jayson Blair). The Times, by many estimates, made the administration’s case for war by publishing now-discredited claims about Iraq’s WMD program (Judith Miller). Dan Rather may have made “fake but accurate” famous, but it was The New York Times that honed the practice to an art form. Maybe they could sell T-shirts?

Representatives from Fox News, CNN, and the BBC were told that broadcasting opinion surveys about Mexico's upcoming election eight days before the voting was forbidden. They are also banned from analyzing the candidates' weaknesses and reporting on campaign activities.

CNN and BBC both have separate feeds from the one shown in America (No Lou Dobbs en Español), so they have no problem complying with the rules. Fox News has only one feed, and would have to alter its entire programming.

Reports the LA Times:

"I just don't think we had much choice," said Janet Alshouse, senior vice president of international distribution for Fox News. "We can't restrict our coverage."

"On December 30, 2005, Congress enacted the DetaineeTreatment Act (DTA). It unambiguously provides that, asof that date, “no court, justice, or judge” shall have jurisdiction to consider the habeas application of a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Notwithstanding this plain directive, the Court today concludes that, on what it calls thestatute’s most natural reading, every “court, justice, or judge” before whom such a habeas application was pending on December 30 has jurisdiction to hear, consider, and render judgment on it. This conclusion is patently erroneous. And even if it were not, the jurisdiction supposedlyretained should, in an exercise of sound equitable discretion, not be exercised."

Then:

"December 30, 2005. As of that date, then, no court had jurisdiction to “hear or consider” the merits of petitioner’shabeas application. This repeal of jurisdiction is simplynot ambiguous as between pending and future cases. It prohibits any exercise of jurisdiction, and it became effective as to all cases last December 30. It is also perfectly clear that the phrase “no court, justice, or judge” includesthis Court and its Members, and that by exercising our appellate jurisdiction in this case we are “hear[ing] orconsider[ing] . . . an application for a writ of habeascorpus.”"

Associated Press TV reporter Lynn Elber profiled CNN commentator Jack Cafferty on Wednesday, and when she asked him about his sense of personal responsibility -- we're not shown the question, but I'm sensing he was asked about popping off without thinking it through --  "Cafferty, his memory triggered, segues directly into recounting the newscast in which he got a jump on then U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay's legal woes."

Said Cafferty: "I thought (anchor) Wolf Blitzer was going to eat his script when I asked if Tom DeLay had been indicted yet, because he hadn't been," Cafferty recalled, adding: "If he hadn't been indicted he probably should have and I hope he goes to prison and sits there for the rest of his life. He's a jerk." Elber then noted: There he goes again, spouting off with the kind of stuff that gets him pilloried on Web sites such as NewsBusters ("Exposing and Combatting Liberal Media Bias.") As in here, or the full Cafferty menu here.

Tech Central Station has a report from the "Satire News Service" about a 1943 New York Times story revealing that the U.S. had successfully cracked Germany's Enigma code. The Times also reported that Japan's code, in an operation called MAGIC, had also been broken.

The publisher of the New York Times, "Paunch" Sulzburger, said releasing the information was important to "know how this war is being fought. It is part of the continuing national debate over the aggressive measures employed by this administration and the British government."

Naturally, left-wing activists praised the paper's actions, including Norman Chomsky, a "professor of phrenology and astrology at MIT."

..... But The Associated Press feels compelled to throw cold water on the news.

________________________________

Wow -- This is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) announcement:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property
located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 5.6 percent in the first quarter of 2006,
according to final estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

..... The increase in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from
personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, equipment and software, and federal government
spending.

The original estimate in April was 4.8%, and the revision in May was to 5.3%. Reuters notes that Wall Street economists had predicted a final revision of 5.5%.

Here's the obligatory cold water thrown by the Associated Press in the 5th, 6th, and 7th paras of their first report on the GDP news (cold-water words in bold):

Is Bush being hypocritical when he attacks the New York Times’ irresponsible revelations of yet another terrorist surveillance program? A headline in Thursday’s Times hints at it -- “Behind Bush’s Fury, a Vow Made in 2001 -- Analysts Are Divided on Effects of Bank Program’s Disclosure.”

Give reporter Scott Shane credit for citing criticism of the Times by Andrew McCarthy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (and a contributor to National Review Online).

But Shane cites a Bush statement from September 24, 2001 to suggest the president is protesting too much about what he considers the Times’ “disgraceful” behavior. Shane’s thrust seems to be that, since Bush said in very general terms that his administration was tracking terrorist funding, he can’t really complain when the Times prints classified details of specific programs on the front page.