http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=NYT&script=300&layout=-6

That Lex is the bottomline.

re Mr. Tice:

Read his staement- “I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters”

Probable? What a pontificating statement……White Knight? We’ll see. I’m sure there are Joey Wilson types at the NSA, too.

B2

You know, there was a time in the way back when that I thought I might leave the service and dip my toe in the legal waters. I don’t know that I’d have been able to take the evident joy in disputation that good lawyers seem to do, nor yet become entertained by this sort of twisted reasoning. But I do, like you, entertain a higher regard for the public’s common sense than does their herald.

Steve – Ah! The white knight revealed at last. A whistleblower, or an axe-grinder? Both, a little, probably.

But those will be the frames.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

link here

Among friends (perhaps among individuals generally) extending an assumption of good faith seems the gentlemanly and courteous thing to do; mutual respect assumes sincerity in the exchange of ideas. But among institutions, organizations, parties…well, the integrity of this wonderful intellectual dialogue almost always defers to other interests. And if you assume that rather weak arguments like this one are made not in good faith but rather to shield an interest…well, they become much less infuriating. They’re actually kind of entertaining in a peculiar way, like a mouse playing a banjo. Ha! “Did not reveal the existence of such surveillance”! And with those tiny little paws!

I’ve always thought that the most insulting response to an adversary’s argument is not a vile string of epithets, but uncontrollable, unfeigned, utterly nonresponsive laughter.

(Yes, the broader consequences of having this sort of thing pass as informed opinion in the grand public debate are not very funny — but on this point, I have a certain faith in American common sense.)

/L-school grad, who seriously thinks the last sentence of the article turns on what the meaning of “existence” is

While I can agree with the first part of your first paragraph’s statement unreservedly, a free press being a critical check on an unconstitutional accumulation of power, the second part I wonder about, in a time of war. “Inter arma silent leges,” is a sentiment I cannot entirely endorse, sworn as I am to support and defend the Constitution, but it is a sentiment whose thrust I understand.

In New York, of all places, you’d think they’d have a finer sense of who the real enemy is. For those of your friends who’d support that interpretation, ask of them for me if it really makes consistent sense that the only appropriate leaks which can occur in a time of war are those that damage the Commander-in-Chief, while those that support his efforts are intolerable. I’m not saying that he’s got a free pass, far from it, but if I was to have to choose between cutting slack to those who are sworn to defend me, or those who have sworn to kill me, I think the choice would be pretty easy.

Reese- it’s amazing, isn’t it? The Times burns a highly classified system on their front page, after having sat on the story for a year! on account perhaps of the People’s Right To Know, and then throws it back on the Executive to prove why the subject should have been classified to begin with. Seems to me like it’s skipping a step or two.

After reading the op-ed I have the same reaction I did when I heard about the NSA program from the NYT: “Gosh, whose side are the editorial boardmembers of that ‘newspaper’ on?”

If their reply would be, “There’s more than two sides,” then they’re really being suckered into the “enemy of my enemy” thing.