What
the New York Times has done is to scream fascist in a
crowded democracy.
Last September, in
a column entitled “Hurricanes Ravaged Mainstream Media,”
I wrote the following, “Is it me or has anyone else
noticed a direct correlation of the diminishing of
terrorist attacks in Iraq with the increase of killer
hurricanes in the US? During Katrina's onslaught,
the headlines of car bombs in Iraq on Yahoo's home page
suddenly disappeared. Then on September 14, as if to
make up for the inattention of the mainstream media, a
huge attack was launched in Baghdad's Kadhimiya
neighborhood that killed 150 Iraqis. With Rita bearing
down on Texas, again, all became eerily quiet on the
Eastern front. Certainly terrorists rely on publicity to
enhance their terror. But the American [mainstream
media’s] obsession with the negative—its focus on
reporting car bomb attacks as the sole news in
Iraq—coupled with its penchant to ignore the good
news in the region may be unintentionally encouraging al
Qaeda.”
The media as an
accomplice with al Qaeda?—I thought long and hard about
making such a charge but in the end, I left it in the
column.
It only took a month
for vindication. In October, in a follow-up piece
entitled “Wine, Water and the Media,” I quoted from a
portion of a letter written by al Qaeda’s #2 man in
Iraq, Ayman al-Zawahri to his top deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Zawahri had written, “In the aftermath of the collapse
of American power in Vietnam—and how they ran and left
their agents, things may develop faster than we
imagine…More than half of this battle [in Iraq] is
taking place in the battlefield of the media.”
Fast forward to more
recent events; media aid to al Qaeda is now occurring
right here in our own country under the phony guise of
civil liberties. Such actions could be endangering
American citizens on American soil.
In the May 13 issue of
WORLD Magazine, Hugh Hewitt has written a short
piece entitled “Above the Law?” In the article, The
New York Times is being accused of violating
espionage laws for publishing articles about the
National Security Agency wiretapping of suspected al
Qaeda terrorists within the US. The Bush administration
had urged the Times not to publish the leaked material,
“arguing that to do so would alert terrorists to the
program’s existence.” But the newspaper went ahead and
published the articles anyway.
What the New York
Times has done is to scream fascist in a crowded
democracy. If liberals—I include the mainstream media,
most Democrats and a few confused Republicans—prefer to
defend the rights of suspected terrorists over the
average citizen, then they are ostensibly abetting al
Qaeda.
The latest tempest in a
teapot Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter are
crying wolf over comes from a USA Today news
story in which it was reported that three telecom
companies, AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon turned over phone
records for millions of their customers to the NSA.
But such monitoring
programs have been going on in this country for years.
And the Supreme Court has ruled that phone records are
not constitutionally protected as “private.”
Do you smell something
here? The timing of this startling revelation is
suspect—happening just as the president has nominated
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the NSA’s former director
to run the CIA. Hayden was responsible for the formerly
covert surveillance program that apparently was
successfully spying on suspected al Qaeda terrorists’
phone calls in the US until the New York Times
opened its big mouth.
While we may never know
if that program had thwarted additional terrorist
attacks on US soil, one thing’s for sure. While these
phony, self-anointed defenders of our civil liberties
continue their histrionics for pure political gain, the
country is less safe. And that in itself is terrifying. n
Gregory
J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist.
