Necessary Secrets

"The Powerline Blog has a post this morning on a surprising honest review in the Washington Post of the new book Necessary Secrets. From the Powerline post:

“The review is by Leonard Downie, Jr., who was the Post’s executive editor until 2008. Downie is obviously uneasy with Schoenfeld’s view that editors and reporters at the New York Times should be prosecuted and imprisoned for revealing two of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism programs – the warrantless intercept program for monitoring calls to the U.S. by foreign terrorists and the program though which the international financial transactions of terrorists were secretly tracked.”

The exposure of these programs by the fearless reporters and editors at the Times unquestionably contributed to the prolonged detention of David Rohde because we lost the tools for finding to a kidnap victim in the tribal areas of Pakistan. For that very reason the Times was forced to find “outside the box” options to try and gain Rohdes’ freedom and apparently one of those options involved hiring civilian contractors who had contacts and access into the denied areas of the North West Frontier. Here is a quote from the first story the Times published on the subject:"
FRI

You cant trust the government to get anything right, not even keep their own secrets. I blame the government, not the paper.