Rather than going after the specific individuals involved, the federal government indicted the Arthur Andersen accounting firm for its role in the Enron scandal. This corporate death sentence sealed the firm's fate and it shut down. Ostensibly, there was a vital public interest in destroying that venerable firm, thousands of jobs, and the partnership equity built up by career employees who never did anything wrong.
If failing to unmask a corporate cover-up is a crime against the public worthy of corporate execution, then what about revealing critical secrets about vital, and legal, counter-terrorism programs? There was no purpose to blowing the lid on the SWIFT financial surveillance program except to degrade its effectiveness. And now that SWIFT has stopped cooperating with American authorities, this highly effective (and, according to politicians on both sides of the aisle, indispensable) program is finished. The Justice Department should indict the Times for treason and let it share Arthur Andersen's fate.
Additionally, we're constantly lectured by liberals that the war on terror needs to be more about intelligence and law enforcement than military power. And it needs to be more about cooperating with our allies. And we need to track their money trails. Democrats should be made to take a stand on this issue, in which a critical program was shut down and cooperation with Europe was kneecapped by a brazenly anti-American newspaper. If the Senate is so preoccupied with meaningless resolutions, then how about one condemning the Times.
Comment: I see the N.Y. Times attacking American policy everyday. We roll over and take it. Like sheep.
Just criticizing Bush and his politics doesn't make you anymore patriotic than the next person, maybe even more so. But, there is a fine line that can easily be crossed. The N.Y. Times is responsible for doing just that.
