(Via Hot Air) All in the name of the scoop, of course. The title is bad enough (”U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors“), but the fools who wrote the article* gave names and procedures.� They also explicitly used still-classified material to break this story:
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Which is illegal.� It was illegal when it happened to Bush, it’s illegal now, and it will be illegal in the next Republican administration.� It’d also be a stupid idea even if it was legal.� Why?� Well, let me tell you a story from World War I.� Supposedly, once the war started British troops in at least one section of the front had made a happy discovery: the Germans artillery apparently thought that the enemy was a bit farther back than they actually were, and were thus essentially overshooting the actual front lines.� Great news… at least, that’s what the British media thought, so they wrote stories about the lucky break in the papers.� And then the Germans read the newspapers - because that’s one thing that foreign agents do; they pass along relevant information from the newspapers - and proceeded to adjust their firing solutions so that they were actually hitting their targets.
I presume that most of my readers get the point, but we might have some visitors from the New York Times or other newspapers, so let me spell this out: printing this story did not help any of the good guys.� It did help the career advancement of half a dozen or so intelligence operatives for some very nasty regimes, as they can now easily pass along to their spymasters formerly-classified or simply obscure details about American covert aid to dissidents.� Those regimes now know who to look for, and where to look; and with that, they can trace paths until they get to somebody that they can actually target.� Which they will, because that is what bad guys do.� Which is why this information was either classified or obscured in the first place.� Put even more simply, this information was on a need-to-know basis, and we did not need to know that. Heck, the only reason I’m even mentioning it now is because the fools put the story on the front page; the damage, as they say, has been done.
In some ways it’d be almost a relief to think of the New York Times as a seditionist organization, but the reality’s even more depressing: it’s simply an institutional sociopath.� If you don’t subscribe, they don’t give a tinker’s dam what happens to you.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Richard A. Oppel Jr, Andrew W. Lehren, Alissa J. Rubin, and Sangar Rahimi. Just to help the government when it investigates this leak.
Source: http://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/2011/06/12/the-new-york-times-kills-itself-some-dissidents/
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