NY Times Shines Spotlight On CIA Transport Operations--Why?

Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams carefully researched public records, interviewed dozens of people and compiled a large and diverse amount of data into an expose of the CIA's covert transportation network, published in today's New York Times under the heading, "C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights."

I do not consider this material newsworthy....unless you are a member of Al Qaeda or a some other group hostile to the United States.

Can you imagine the N.Y. Times publishing an article in 1944 headlined, "Eisenhower Expanding War Effort With Plans To Invade Normandy"?

I wouldn't have needed to know that bit of information, either. In fact, as an American citizen, I would not have wanted to know that information. "Loose lips sink ships," they used to say. I wonder what they say at the Times these days?

Ironically, the story serves no purpose other than to undermine national security. The irony is that the story is so senseless and damaging that the publishing of the story is a far bigger story than the story itself!

Why does the media feel that any secret they can reveal that hurts the Bush administration and its policy initiatives is a good thing, but the revealing of their anonymous sources is a bad thing?

I would hold that protecting the clandestine security activities of those engaged in a life and death struggle against people who want to destroy us is far more honorable than protecting the name of someone who leaks information that compromises our national safety and wastes a vast amount of taxpayer money invested into complex covert operations.

Although the CIA contracting with Aero Contractors is hardly a secret unbeknownst to the governments and militaries of the international community, it would be considered very bad form for even an Iran or North Korea to publish such information for propaganda purposes.

Apparently the Times does not feel the need to show even the same level of restraint shown to the United States by its sworn enemies.

I should think that the US Executive Branch would be justified by revoking all press privileges for the New York Times and cease from releasing any news of any kind to them. If anybody in the media ever deserved to be blackballed and marginalized I would imagine that the NY Times would find itself ranked very high on someone's list today.

Click to enlarge

Also listed in an attachment to today's Times article is a chart showing all the business fronts for the air carriers involved as well as the names of those listed as corporate trustees or board members of more than one of them. I wonder if this will put any of them in jeopardy of their lives? Does the NY Times care? No, of course not. They do, however, protect the names of the Iraqi "insurgents" that they embed themselves with. They wouldn't want to put them at risk, would they?

I'm afraid that this continuing trend in the MSM is making me and millions of other Americans consider revisiting the self-anointed absolute rights of a free press to print anything and everything without fear of penalty or consequences. Such thinking, however, scare me to death! The repression of the media by government edict would be disastrous.

By its unrestrained, intentional undermining of our government's efforts to conduct foreign policy and "provide for the common defense," however, the American MSM is sowing the seeds of the destruction of the very freedom that it cherishes.

True freedom carries with it the freedom to responsibly restrict one's own freedom to protect and preserve the freedom of all. What the MSM as a whole, and the New York Times today in particular, is practicing is not freedom, but anarchy.