Hattip: Captain’s Quarters

President Bush called the disclosure of the Swift program, a classified program to monitor terrorist’s international bank transactions, “disgraceful”. He added that it, “makes it harder to win this war on terror,” and that, “Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law.” CQ correctly points out that this is exactly the type of program recommended by the 9/11 Commission (which the NYT and the left deify only when they can use it to bash Bush).

Hattip: American Spectator Blog

AG Gonzales was on the Rush Limbaugh show this morning and said it’s, “way premature to be talking about prosecution of the New York Times.” Funny, I would have thought that after the commission of a crime and the determination of who committed the crime would be exactly the time to start talking about a prosecution. Basically the Bush administration is saying that treason is an appropriate method to pursue a pulitzer and that the NYT can impede our war efforts with impunity.

John Hawkins at RightWingNews argues that, “prosecuting the New York Times is the wrong way to deal with the problem.” While he’s correct in saying we need to “aggressively investigate every significant national security leak,” I don’t see why we can’t also prosecute the Times for their hand in the crime.

His reasoning for opposing prosecution of journalists appears at first a valid one. “If the government is allowed to start holding jail time over the heads of members of the press for reporting classified info, we’ll risk tumbling down the slippery slope in a hurry. Government officials hate it when any classified or secret data is revealed, whether it’s related to national security or not, and if they can get away with forbidding the press from printing it, they’ll do so.”

However, I don’t think that’s really a likely situation. If government starts prosecuting a number of journalists with flimsy reasoning the public wouldn’t stand for it and they could vote them out. There’s a natural check on that type of abuse. We can prosecute in this specific case, where the crime is so obviously detrimental to our war efforts, without fear of a slippery slope.

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