It is a joy and a pleasure to have Beldar back in the blogosphere. He has two posts up (here and here) dealing with a case I blogged about back in August: Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury subpoena aimed at the Times’ 2001 disclosure of upcoming searches and asset freezes to the targets of those searches, two foundations that were raising money for terrorists. The Supreme Court declined recently to grant emergency relief to stop the Times from having to comply with the subpoena. This post in particular is a must-read, as Beldar patiently explains why a recent Times editorial is so thoroughly disingenuous in its treatment of the Times’ own legal position.
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In the end, it still comes down to the: “National Security vs. Free Press” argument. Frankly, I would almost always prefer to come down on free press side.
Governments of every party tends toward claiming everything is top secret, we never did anything wrong, and we cover up. This administration seems to make a personal hobby of covering up. Look at Cheney and the hunting accident. It was very much an accident, yet somehow, it had to be covered up.
We pay prices for everything. A totally transparent government and financial system is never going to happen, and is probably unworkable. But total opacity doesn’t work either. September 11th really happened because of a lack of long term planning on the parts of every administration, starting with at least Jimmy Carter (yes I am a democrat, but detest Carter with a passion, and as long as James Buchanan exists, Carter can’t be the worst president ever-and is a lousy ex-president too), and culminated in the institutional compartmentation that prevented the FBI, CIA and NSA from seeing the overall picture.
Should the Times or any other paper leak what should not be? Maybe not, but the idea that a government decides it is kind of anti-American to me. The power of the press gave us Hayes over Tilden (and it was the Times then too); but this administration has not exactly given me reason to trust their intentions either. The answer is in the middle. Stop covering up everything, and maybe you will develop some trust too.