Bush Calls It: NY Times "Disgraceful"

President Bush said yesterday that it was "disgraceful" that the mainstream media had disclosed a secret CIA-Treasury program to track millions of financial records in search of terrorist suspects. Bush accused The New York Times of breaking a long tradition of keeping wartime secrets.

"The fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror," Bush said, leaning forward and jabbing his finger during a brief question-and-answer session with reporters in the Roosevelt Room. I noted that Bush then turned on his heels and departed.

Finally -- some "official" and public anger on behalf of this administration with regard to the prodigious leak problems encountered during the second Bush term.

It is this kind of public display of anger that can only help the president rally support against such a contentious and heinous abrogation of the First Amendment as evidenced by the NY Times.

Vice President Cheney said:

The New York Times has now twice -- on two separate occasions -- disclosed programs; both times they had been asked not to publish those stories by senior administration officials. They went ahead anyway. The leaks to The New York Times and the publishing of those leaks is very damaging.

"Damaging" is being kind; there appears to be, and properly so, a growing swell of those who believe the NY Times and those responsible for the leak and its subsequent publishing should be prosecuted criminally. Count me as one of those persons.

We are at War, plain and simple. An issue such as this should cross all political leanings; we should be unified in our support of the War Against Islamists.

And yet, the NY Times is still playing in the Kiddies Pool by printing, in a puerile fit of pique, what amounts to the entire US intelligence community's gameplan with regard to tracking money moved by terrorists. They are not stupid; they will now only go deeper and make this same tracking and identification that much more difficult.

We have collectively shot ourselves in the foot so that the DEM can slam our president and sell more papers when they are bleeding readers and cash. Make no mistake: this act by the New York Times was motivated by greed. How callow and craven is this?

This is beyond disgraceful; it requires a full investigation and a prosecution criminally by the US Attorney General and the Department of Justice.

Even John Murtha, yesterday's Moonbat, urged the Times not to print the information.

That is how far off the reservation the NY Times has strayed.

BZ