They Think Know They’re Above the Law, and Above the Mere Mortals Responsible for National Security

How else to react to The New York Times’ sweeping exposure of an effective law-enforcement tool against terror?

And hold the story when the government requests it? Please — who are they? They’re only responsible for keeping us safe. How dare they interfere with “journalism”?

I fail to see any public benefit to exposing the successful monitoring of the world financial system to detect the flow of money to and between terrorists. I see lots of downside in failing to detect terror activities.

Who wants to argue that we’re not less safe now than we were 24 hours ago?

This is covered like a blanket at Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, NRO’s Media Blog, Ankle Biting Pundits, Patterico, Iowa Voice, Sister Toldjah, Protein Wisdom, and others too numerous to mention.
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UPDATE: Heavyweight weigh-ins come from Captain Ed, Atlas Shrugs, and Don Surber. And Michelle Malkin is running a thread of e-mails to The Times that you can bet The Times won’t print. Also, she’s displaying Photoshop jobs on the topic at the end of this post.

UPDATE 2: Don Luskin makes a HUGE point about Times Editor Bill Keller’s key sentence defending his paper’s actions. Here’s Keller:

“We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use it may be, is a matter of public interest,” said Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor.

Luskin says:

Note that he’s talking about “the administration’s” access to the data, not government’s access. In other words, if any story can colorably create the impression that this administration — this Republican administration — is abusing information on citizens, then the “public interest” in the Times making that argument overrides all other considerations of protecting the life and limb of those same citizens.

Don, I think it’s worse than that. As far as The Times is concerned, there is no distinction between “the government” and “the administration.” To them, George Bush is in charge of an (unrestrained, as far as they’re concerned) “administration” that has its hands on all the levers of power and has to be defeated, so a more acceptable (to them) administration (again unrestrained, but that’s okay because a different administration would be “doing good”) can be installed. Nothing else matters.

UPDATE 3: Andrew McCarthy at National Review lays out the ugly truth:

The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.

The anti-warriors know only the language of self-interest. It is the language that tells them the revelation of the nation’s secrets will result, forthwith, in the demand for the revelation of their secrets — which is to say, their sources in the intelligence community — with incarceration the price of resistance. It is the language admonishing that even journalists themselves may be prosecuted when their publication of national secrets violates the law.

Bluntly, officials who leak the classified information with which they have been entrusted can be prosecuted for theft of government property. If the information is especially sensitive, they can be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act. In either event, the press has no legal right to protect such lawlessness.

That is our simple choice: Strong medicine we will either take or persist in declining … while resigning ourselves to more of the same.

UPDATE 4, June 25: New York Times editor Bill Keller published an incredibly weak defense of the Times’ decision to publish, which among other things proves that The Times sees no difference between “the administration” and “the government.” Hugh Hewitt does a thorough fisking, while Paul at Wizbang gives us the Cliff’s Notes version — “Dear Reader:
1) We have no reason to believe the program was illegal in any way. 2) We have every reason to believe it was effective at catching terrorists. 3) We ran the story anyway, screw you.”

UPDATE 5, June 25: Hewitt also links and excerpts an excellent letter to The Times from a milblogging soldier, who nails down a critical factor Mr. Keller “somehow” failed to mention — our soldiers’ safety: “Thank you for continually contributing to the deaths of my fellow soldiers. You guys definitely provide a valuable service with your paper. Why without you how would terrorists stay one step ahead of us?”