The recent kerfuffle over several newspaper revealing a heretofore unknown intelligence operation involving the tracking of overseas financial transactions to look for terrorist funds has led to a little introspection on the part of the media. In this case, the NYTimes.
KATHARINE GRAHAM, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 2001, backed her editors through tense battles during the Watergate era. But in a 1986 speech, she warned that the media sometimes made "tragic" mistakes.
Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.
"This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities," Ms. Graham said.
But such cooperation can prove problematic, as her newspaper's former editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, has recounted.
In 1986, after holding for weeks at government request a scoop about an N.S.A. tap on a Soviet undersea communications cable, The Post learned that the Russians knew all about it already from an N.S.A. turncoat named Ronald Pelton. NBC beat The Post on its own report.
As others have noted, the risk of disclosure is American lives. The risk to the media of nondisclosure is that they might get scooped. Lord help us if someone in the media gets scooped.
by Dann
|
Blog Home
The Marine Corps
Michael Yon
