WH Bluff on NYT Story Shown to Be Made of Gas

http://www.prospect.org/horsesmouth/2006/06/post_166.html

WHITE HOUSE WON'T REVOKE TIMES'S PRESS CREDENTIALS. OK, so White House press secretary Tony Snow has now told Editor and Publisher that the New York Times won't have its press credentials taken away, as National Review has demanded. Nor is Alberto Gonzalez likely to "prosecute" the Times, because it would be a political circus.

This is kind of strange. Both Snow and Dick Cheney have explicitly said that the Times is putting the nation's security at risk. Yet by all indications the administration is unlikely to take any real action against the paper, mainly because it could be politically disastrous for Bush.

That leaves only two possibilities. Either:

1) Officials won't act aggressively against an institution they're claiming puts American lives at risk, because it's politically untenable. That would mean the administration is putting politics ahead of aggressively prosecuting behavior it says endangers American lives.

Or:

2) The administration doesn't genuinely believe The Times has put our national security at risk at all, and hence won't act. If this is the case, both Snow and Cheney blatantly and repeatedly lied.

So there you have it. Either the administration is putting politics ahead of national security and won't act aggressively against an institution it says is endangering American lives -- because it would be bad for Bush. Or the administration's claim that The Times endangered national security is just the latest in a long string of lies it has told to the American people. Which is it?

...

via War and Piece:


http://counterterrorismblog.org/2006/06/reports_of_us_monitoring_of_sw.php

Yesterday’s New York Times Story on US monitoring of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) transactions certainly hit the street with a splash. It awoke the general public to the practice. In that sense, it was truly new news. But reports on US monitoring of SWIFT transactions have been out there for some time. The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002. The UN Al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group , on which I served as the terrorism financing expert, learned of the practice during the course of our monitoring inquiries. The information was incorporated in our report to the UN Security Council in December 2002. That report is still available on the UN Website. Paragraph 31 of the report states:

“The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.”

C'mon, when haven't they done this? DHS was an action designed to break up Government Employee Unions.
Outing Plame was to score points, whoo cares if she worked for nuclear non-proliferation? All of this slime and corruption is too keep the criminal GOP in power.

When they start to front page some of the more glaring crimes I might reassess my opinion of them

they backed bush ever since 2000 elections and have been the whitehouse newspaper ever since. judy the whore was a direct link to the whitehouse before and during the war...

You can see the attempts to increase subscriptions among the left blogosphere

PNAC has nothing to do with it. This is just Rove trying to score points with the little red piggies in the red states. Nothing more nor less.

Everything is fine now , there was never anything close to a goodcop/badcop relationship btw nyt and WH

The Times is certainly not innocent in having published Miller's lies in the run-up to the war. It wasn't innocent in the Wang Lee case. It wasn't innocent during the Whitewater bullshit. But you will have to show me that it has anything more than an adversarial relationship with the Bushists. Not to say their agendas are always at odds. Not at all. But the WH views the Times (and all media) as a competing power.

The indisputable fact is that a real terrorist operates under the assumption that they must do everything possible to avoid detection, and is further evidence that the NYTimes story is fabricated drama.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1524077

Bush himself told terrorists that banks would be monitored
from Bush remarks of September 24, 2001:



Also, cal04's post is very good: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1523612 offering further evidence that this is all a big show.

Bush gets to look like he cares about catchin' the terrorists and scores one for his base by attacking the "liberal" media.

The NYT gets to look like it stood up to the pressures of the WH and published this story out of a responsibility to the "public interest".

How nice.

lol

Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.

Again?

This time for sure.

story? (where Bush/Rummy failed to secure tons of explosives now in the hands of terrorists in Iraq?
or the op-ed they published by Joe Wilson which started the whole Plame affair?
No of course not. You just assume the NYTimes is bad, when in fact it is still a good outlet for liberal views.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html?ex=1256356800&en=3bcf849cf3a68472&ei=5090&partner=kmarxHuge

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

That's what this is all about.

In time for the midterms.

IMO, it's part of an on going battle to take out their perceived enemies. If the red-staters get in a lather, it's a bonus, but not their primary strategy.

They're so freakin' obvious. They don't care if the Times lives or dies. They just want to keep Republicans in control of a compliant Congress.

(Reprinted by permission of the author)

Bush's Furnace of Fear
by teresa simon-noble

Bush's latest henchman Feeding Fire to the Furnace of Fear was Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York, during a recent television appearance in which he questioned the New York Times for what, he said, was,the Times, "...putting its own arrogant elitist left wing agenda before the interests of the American people."

His voice, gruff with indignation, the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, looked and sounded the part of a hellfire, damnation and brimstone god of old, spewing acrid volcanic lava against a newspaper for merely doing its job-that is, ratting err, excuse me, for reporting, as it ought to, and bringing into broad daylight one more of Bush's crimes against the American people: secretly snooping into their financial records.

King said he would call on our Machiavellian attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, to launch a full fledged criminal investigation and prosecution into the New York Time's leaking and reporting of the government's secret mining of thousands of American's bank accounts and financial records.

King may have been hoping to stoke some anxiety and the fires of fear in any other reporter, or news organization, or even private citizen, who would dare to speak truth to power about the Bush criminal administration. (Whoa there Chairman King, your outfit is beginning to look like that of Chairman Mao's. Or, are you stealing a page from the politicians of Ancient Greece who had Socrates drink from the cup of hemlock for merely stating truth to power? Would you also have put Jesus Christ to death for speaking humble truth to power?)

Spewing something about how the time has come for the New York Times to realize that we are at war (excuse me, please, Chairman King, but Bush launched an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq which is what he is still conducting; we were never at war with Iraq and we are currently not at war in Iraq-and isn't pursuing "terrorists" more of a policing effort than a war effort?) an indignant King went on to talk about how little the newspaper cares about saving innocent lives against terrorists' attacks.

Spewing all his volcanic ash, King looked more like Big Bad Wolf intent on doing away with Little Red Riding Hood, than a chairman truly concerned with safeguarding an America which always trusted its right to privacy.

So, the latest Bush god of damnation, hellfire and brimstone, Peter King, aided and abetted by a request to Bush's Machiavellian attorney general, wants to do-in, in one swoop of his hands the freedom and sweet innocence of an entire nation which, up until the 2000 Bush coup d'etat, has had, as one of its symbols, a statue representing liberty right there at the entrance to New York harbor, right in front of Mr. King's eyes.

Perhaps Chairman King never bothered to visit the Statue of Liberty, or perhaps he wore blinders when he visited it, or perhaps he failed to comprehend its symbolism, or perhaps he never bothered to read the Constitution of the United States of America which states that congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of speech nor shall it make any laws abridging the freedom of the press...and while he is not proposing any laws prohibiting freedom of the press, he certainly is going after the freedom of the press to inform its citizens of the sins and crimes committed by its government.

To wash his hands of the guilt of conspiracy against the people, Chairman King wraps his gruff, thunderous voice in what appears to be moral indignation and bellows that he will go after the New York Times, the reporters, the editors who worked on the report, and the publisher of the Times for what Mr. King calls The New York Times' crime against his government. Then he adds, referring to the Times, "they're the ones who gave Fidel Castro his job in Cuba." (Whoa there, again, Chairman King. I thought it was the people of Cuba, who, because of Batista's corrupt and repressive regime, gave Fidel Castro his job in Cuba. I thought it was all of the blood shed by Cubans, fighting against the Batista regime and in support of Castro's revolution the ones who gave Castro his job in Cuba. I thought it was the Cuban people seeking freedom from the Batista dictatorship the ones who gave Castro his job in Cuba. Are you, as honorable and as morally indignant as you want to make yourself sound, grasping at straws to feed fire to Bush's furnace of fear? O, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy!).

One has to wonder at this point, whether Chairman King is governed by the use of reason and a clear vision, or whether he is governed by the panic process. A process which, as Andrea Malone-Schara states, is based on fear and denial-two emotions which run counter to rational thinking and rational problem-solving based on facts.

Chairman King seems to be in a reactive mode-to protect the Bush administration against any truth that may broadside it, or hit it head-on, or in any way strive to uncover its criminal and dictatorial powers-so, the Chairman feeds fire to Bush's furnace of fear.

And, America once again buys a Chairman's lies and furnace of fear, just like it bought Colin Powell's lies before the United Nations.

The Bushes score and seal another link on the repressive chain with which they have been slowly chaining the American people since the 2000 Bush coup d'etat, while Lady Liberty cries and her torch is made more and more opaque not by the 911 crew which broadsided the twin towers, but by the likes of Bush, Colin Powell, and Peter King who know how to lie and push the panic buttons which keep people in reactive modes of their own and away from being able to look at the facts of the Bush administration rationally and come up with a thought through conclusion of their own regarding what to do about the Bush administration or how to get Poppy's son off one's back.

When America finally and completely wakes up to the betrayal perpetrated upon it by Bush, his Poppy, and the likes of Peter King, we will find our tears joining those of Lady Liberty over the loss of our freedom and the dismantling of our democracy.

I believe it was last night when he was talking to Craig Crawford. Anyway, he said that in 2002 the Bush administration talked about this because they wanted people to know what they were doing to pursue terrorists.

So if the NY Times is treasonous, then so is the administration.