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The headline of my post is the way I see it. But let’s first rewind to where this story begins.

We all know that the New York Times published national security secrets to criticize the Bush administration for its efforts to track terrorists using financial records from an international database. We also know that the NY Times defended the publication as a necessary “public interest” story even though the beneficial swift bank program was legal by the Times own admission.

Now the NY Times ombudsman who originally defended the actions of the paper has issued a “mea culpa” in the back end of an editorial titled “Can ‘Magazines’ of The Times Subsidize News Coverage?”.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

This is an amazing “correction”. Essentially what we have here is an admission that the New York Times created a subcontext to the story when none existed. The whole point of the expose was premised on the potential for abuse by the Bush administration.

If you had stopped reading the “corrective commentary” at this point you might simply write the original story off as the product of a paranoid fear of authority or that the Times was acting as a watchdog over a potentially abusive program. In reality though the underlying reasons are much more insidious. For all practical purposes the New York Times threw practicality out the window and exposed national security secrets out of spite. They were hitting back at what Byron Calame characterizes as “vicious criticism” from the Bush administration.

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven’t been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program. The lack of appropriate oversight — to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention — was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight.

In addition, I became embarrassed by the how-secret-is-it issue, although that isn’t a cause of my altered conclusion. My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a “secret” program was being exposed. (If one sentence down in the article had acknowledged that a number of people were probably aware of the program, both the newsroom and I would have been better able to address that wave of criticism.)

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press — two traits that I warned readers about in my first column. [emphasis mine]

This is typical of the high brow elitists at the nation’s most biased national newspaper. They show how little regard they have for the seriousness of their actions by releasing this commentary at the end of the Sunday news cycle buried inside an article on another topic.

But hey, stories of the Swift Bank type are a particular sore point to the Europeans. We should be thankful that the New York Times decided to undermine the security of the United States in recognition of the hypersensitive fears of foreign opponents of the Bush administration.

In reality this isn’t a mea culpa at all. Rather it is yet another defense of an act that they now are admitting was wrong.

This would be almost laughable if not for the fact that the New York Times made it harder for our government to protect American citizens from murderous terrorists. To make matters worse they did it on an international stage out of spite.

Many of us in the blogosphere don’t have to wonder how many other “news” stories suffer under the dark cloud of detached objectivity at the New York Times because we see it every day. This latest editorial by Byron Calame is all the proof I need.

Others Covering this Story

• The Anchoress: “I hated Bush so much I couldn’t do my job…”
• Michelle Malkin : NYTimes editor now admits: We were wrong to blab
• Captains Quarters : NYT’s Calame: Oops. Our Bad.
• Flopping Aces: Bush Made Me Do it
• The Political Pit Bull: NY Times Ombudsman: We Were Wrong To Publish Story On Secret Banking-Data Surveillance Program
• Patterico’s Pontifications: Byron Calame Should Resign
• Macs Mind: NSA - Ny Times preparing for the worse?
• Riehl World View: Who Benefits From NY Times Mea Culpa?
• A Blog For All: NYT Public Editor Admits Publication of SWIFT Story Wrong
• Iowa Voice: NYTs Editor Now Regrets Printing Leak
• La Shawn Barber’s Corner: NYT Public Editor Brian Calame Should Resign
• Just One Minute: Times Public Editor - SWIFT Disclosure Was Wrong
• Wizbang: NYT Blabbing Admission — We Were Wrong, But It Was Bush’s Fault

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