NYT Editor Bill Keller Feels Heat, Pompously Defends Latest Attack on a US Spy Program

President (make that Times editor) Bill Keller must be feeling the heat about his paper’s irresponsible banking spy scoop from Friday. Sunday afternoon he took the trouble to publish an open letter to readers (online only) justifying his executive decision to expose the details of yet another classified terrorist surveillance program, this one involving the surveillance of bank records of a Belgian international banking cooperative called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT.

Keller’s quick response suggests a truckload of negative feedback, a tsunami hinted at by the trickle of letters to the editor that the paper has actually printed. The Letters section, which is usually reliably stacked in a pro-liberal direction, was actually running 4-2 against the story in Saturday’s edition, notes Nathan Goulding at National Review Online.

Keller, who may have crippled the classified surveillance program involving international banking records seven months after doing the same to the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, comes off as prissy and defensive, suggesting conservatives are only parroting what they hear before making a ridiculous accusation of hypocrisy: “

"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.)”

As if terrorists monitor talk radio and conservative blogs religiously, but not the New York Times? In fact, given the paper’s coverage of the NSA and this latest banking records scoop, it would seem to be a must read.

There’s some typical pomp, suggesting that exposing classified surveillance programs that carry no legitimate legal concerns is the patriotic thing to do:

“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.”

I’m sure General Washington would have looked kindly at a broadsheet that had published secret details of, say, his Christmas plans to cross the Delaware and capture Trenton.

After bringing in the Bay of Pigs, of all things, into the discussion, Keller gets to the rub:

“Our decision to publish the story of the Administration's penetration of the international banking system followed weeks of discussion between Administration officials and The Times, not only the reporters who wrote the story but senior editors, including me. We listened patiently and attentively. We discussed the matter extensively within the paper. We spoke to others -- national security experts not serving in the Administration -- for their counsel. It's worth mentioning that the reporters and editors responsible for this story live in two places -- New York and the Washington area -- that are tragically established targets for terrorist violence. The question of preventing terror is not abstract to us.”

Media critic Dan Kennedy, who thinks Keller makes a good case, nonetheless questions the “self-pitying touches and the ahistorical take on the Bay of Pigs.”

Keller was quoted in the Times on Friday:

“We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Fighting terrorism and keeping Americans safer is also a matter of “public interest” – and the Times itself admits that the banking spy program had captured terrorists. But apparently the Times has higher priorities, like selling papers to a core audience ready to be outraged by anything the Bush administration does.

For more on this story and other New York Times bias, visit TimesWatch.