#3: Collaborator Category: The New York Times
When we consider the matter of the New York Times, we leave behind us the ink-stained trivialities of mere journalism and enter into the exciting world of intelligence services on behalf of America’s enemies. We reach beyond apologetics into the realm of operations.
Let us briefly revisit a couple of the glorious services they have rendered to the cause of the caliphate.
In 2006 the Times gleefully announced to the breathless appreciation of terrorists and jihaddists around the world that:
Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States …
The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. …
… The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans’ financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift. …
Thus was the Swift surveillance program revealed to the world. And the helpful Times did not limit itself to generalities:
… Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders. …
… The cooperative’s message traffic allows investigators, for example, to track money from the Saudi bank account of a suspected terrorist to a mosque in New York. …
… The data does not allow the government to track routine financial activity, like A.T.M. withdrawals, confined to this country, or to see bank balances, Treasury officials said. And the information is not provided in real time — Swift generally turns it over several weeks later. …
… Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said. …
… The data also helped identify a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges last year, the officials said. The man, Uzair Paracha, who worked at a New York import business, aided a Qaeda operative in Pakistan by agreeing to launder $200,000 through a Karachi bank, …
Now that”s nice specific actionable intelligence.
Contemporaneously, and continuously for years, the NYT has been a leader in the campaign to expose and shut down anti-jihaddist secret interrogation centers — the black sites affair. As you might imagine, their coverage has been extensive and detailed:
- In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse
- Jane Mayer: ‘The Dark Side’ – The New York Times
- Secret U.S. Endorsement Of Severe Interrogations
- Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation
- A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails
- The Prison Puzzle
- The Banality of Bush White House Evil
- The Torture Papers
- Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
- Photo of The Szymany Airport in Poland near a C.I.A. “black site.”
And needless to say, they haven’t restricted themselves to dry facts. Even their language has been consistently lurid:
… Why does the Bush administration keep forcing policies on the United States military that endanger Americans wearing the nation’s uniform – policies that the military does not want, that do not work and that violate standards upheld by the civilized world for decades?
When the Bush administration rewrote the rules for dealing with prisoners after 9/11, needlessly scrapping the Geneva Conventions and American law, …
Torture was a tool in the campaign to exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would support a war that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. …
… From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture? …
And we mustn’t depart from our appreciation of the Times without at least a word of respect for that famous intelligence leak of 2005 “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts” — the affair of the warrantless wiretaps.
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications. …
And as we all recall, the Times, which had very nearly been hauled into court on criminal charges over this matter, suceeded by this deft stroke and the subsequent coverage, in forcing then president Bush to abandon the program — placing yet another obstacle in the way of the hated American spies. A true victory for the faithful forces of the caliphate.
But this is not to say that the Times has been remiss in the matter of arguing the case for their friends … and our enemies. Just to finish up by giving the newspaper due credit for spreading the Islamo-fascist message, I will just cherry-pick a few quotes from a randomly chosen article, the first to come up in Google for the terms “Israel Hamas” on NYTimes.com:
Israel’s deadly commando raid on a flotilla seeking to break the three-year Israeli embargo on Gaza has once again pushed the Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas into the forefront of Middle East politics. …
As the government of Israel comes under sustained international criticism over the killings of civilians in international waters, the ramifications may prove more wide-reaching, …
Israel insists the blockade is necessary to stop arms flowing to Hamas, but Palestinians and international human rights organizations condemn them as collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians. …
… Mr. Farrell and Prof. Milton-Edwards argue that although Hamas is chiefly notorious in the West for its shootings, suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel, the key to its political success is that it has also spent decades … creating an extensive social welfare network of orphanages, summer camps, mosques, medical facilities and charities. …
Hamas also has a reputation for honesty and integrity …
… Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the continued expansion of Jewish settlements.
As its stock continues to plummet, and its credibility among reasonable Americans continues to evaporate, the NY Times continues to soldier on, committed above all else to the progressive/communist/progressive/liberal agenda, and the cause of America’s enemies.
Worst of all, the Times remains the paper of record for much of America’s elite. Its quality reporting, what remains of it, serves only as a lure, to lend the prestige of truth to its toxic propaganda.
