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February 10, 2012
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The Kosher Gourmet byDana Velden: Going to the bother of making soup? You know it better be good. This CREAM OF TOMATO SOUP certainly is! And it's a cinch to make, too (Includes techinques and serving secrets)
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Victoria Kim: Immigrant-smuggling ring used black drivers to avoid racial profiling
February 2, 2012
Jim Carney: Wrong number call may have saved her life
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Emily Brandon: How to Take Advantage of New 401(k) Fee Disclosures
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Meg Handley: Banks Revamping Rewards Programs to Woo Customers
January 27, 2012
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Yochonon Donn: In liberal New York City, fervently-Orthodox Jews may soon be getting a district to call their own
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Katy Hopkins: New budget rules may affect how much money you get for college
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Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
Richard Simon: House passes two bills endorsing the use of religious symbols at military memorials
Fred Weir: Putin: Multiethnic Russia cannot survive as a US-style 'melting pot'; must find its own way
Susan Johnston: 5 Sneaky Coupon Strategies Consumers Should Watch Out For
January 24, 2012
Carol Clark: The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
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Warren Richey: Drug criminal scores win in GPS ruling from conservative-leaning high court
Erika Bolstad: Black conservatives gather to talk about gaining strength
January 23, 2012
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Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
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Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: No-kidding red lines: U.S. response to an Iranian nuke may be bluster, but Israel's won't be
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January 13, 2012
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Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz: Thriving through touch: Gentle massage helps older people with low mobility improve in mind and body
January 12, 2012
Warren Richey: Landmark Supreme Court ruling a 'resounding win' for religious groups
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Katy Hopkins : Consider This Before You Pay for an Online Degree
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January 11, 2012
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Tom Hussain: Pakistan -- recipient of more than $21 billion in civilian and military aid -- speeds pursuit of Iranian pipeline, defying US
David G. Savage: High court signals it won't be loosening TV's 'indecency' rules
Stephen Ceasar: Oklahoma's Islamic law amendment can't go into effect, court rules
January 10, 2012
Reza Kahlili: From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Karen Kaplan: Study: Nicotine replacement products ineffective when used in real-life situations
January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
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Jewish World Review
June 27, 2006
/ 1 Tamuz, 5766
Government by and for The NYTimes
By
Rich Lowry
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Who made Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, the nation's classification czar? By running the nation's foremost newspaper, Keller gets to decide which secrets of the U.S. government are maintained and which aren't and his default position is to expose them all.
This amounts to an extraordinary accretion of public power in the hands of an individual, and a self-interested individual at that. When he blows secrets, Keller gets more attention and presumably more business for his newspaper. It's a little like letting Bill Gates effectively set the nation's regulatory and antitrust policy, or the head of the ethanol-dependent agri-business Archer Daniels Midland determine our farm and energy policy (which actually happens but that's another story). In any other instance but its own, the Times would excoriate this seepage of guardianship of the public trust from elected officials and civil servants to a private interest.
The Times published a long story the other day exposing a secret government program to track the international bank transfers of terrorist suspects. The story reported that the program is legal, effective and, as far as any Bush anti-terror initiative can be in the current poisonous environment, uncontroversial. Nonetheless, Keller defended its publication as "a matter of public interest." If the program had violated laws or allowed the government to riffle through the routine banking transactions of Americans (it doesn't on either count), Keller might have had a case. But there is nothing about the program that countervails the clear public interest in limiting terrorist financing.
Every time the press exposes a secret anti-terror program, the media's apologists shrug it off as no big deal, since terrorists already know that they are being tracked and monitored. But clearly not all terrorists knew that the U.S. was tracking cross-border transactions, say, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. Otherwise, the program wouldn't have helped net a couple of major terrorist figures in Southeast Asia, or figured in terrorist prosecutions. Now they know.
On the one hand, the implicit contention of the Times is that the public almost never has an interest in secrecy, in having classified matters kept that way. On the other, it jealously guards the identity of its secret sources and wants its ability to do so in defiance of governmental investigations written into law. Here is the ultimate arrogation of public power the Times demanding legal protection for its own secrets so it can better expose the government's.

This attitude reflects what is, in the minds of the members of the press, an ongoing crisis of legitimacy of the U.S. government, going back to Watergate and the FBI and CIA scandals of the 1970s. It was these abuses that created the decaying, but still regnant Imperial Press, which now reflexively adopts an adversarial stance toward our government even when it is acting in an effective way, fully within its power and abusing no one. The closest the Times could come to a hint of scandal in the financial-tracking program was that "one person had been removed from the operation for conducting a search considered inappropriate." This is hardly wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr.
As the pendulum swung toward media power in the 1970s, it should swing away from it now. Yes, the press has a role in exposing government abuses, which will sometimes involve reporting on secrets. Yes, the press deserves deference in keeping with the First Amendment. But it cannot be a government unto itself. The U.S. government should reassert itself by vigorously pursuing the leakers who broke the law to describe the tracking program to the Times.
The reporters who wrote about it, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, should be subpoenaed, and if they refuse to reveal their sources, they should go to jail. There, they can reflect on why their secrets are so much more sacred than those of the people of the United States, as represented by their duly constituted government.
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© 2006 King Features Syndicate
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