Michael Ledeen had an excellent post at The Corner last night, reminding the media that Islamofascists don't distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in their war against the West. With Bill Keller leading the war against national security here in the United States, perhaps Ledeen's reminder should get put to the top of Keller's reading list when he returns from his "vacation":

Keller et al have confirmed yet again that they don’t care about national security, at least in this war (sorry, the current circumstances; they don’t think we’re at war). What they really want is the defeat of George W Bush, and the devil take the consequences.

They have forgotten that the terrorists love to behead journalists. But Daniel Pearl, well, it’s such a long time ago, you know...

The next point is: Who leaks? The answer is, enemies of the president’s policies leak. His supporters don’t. That basic rule helps understand both the background and the current state of play regarding the classified document that Hoekstra and Santorum are trying to get declassified. The media reaction is twofold: First, to pooh-pooh its significance (the kind of stuff I might find under my sink, the drooling Jane Harman says). Second, to ig nore it, to bury it in distant pages of the paper, to touch on it lightly in the evening news.

The NYT and its ilk pound their chests about the revelations of the successful search of financial data to catch terrorists. They declare they are acting because of the public’s right to know. But in the matter of WMDs found in Iraq, the public’s right to know is totally dissed. There is NO call for the declassification of that document, NO righteous indignation at Negroponte, Cambone and the others who quite improperly failed to inform Congressional oversight committees of the existence of this document, and are fighting its declassification and release, NO investigative action to discover why this information was suppressed, NO curiosity about how Hoekstra and Santorum found out it existed.

It isn't that the Times relegated the information about the WMD finds to its back pages or to the small links on its website; the Times never bothered to report it at all. While Keller finds a public need to know in the classified details of counterterrorism efforts, whose publication renders them ineffective afterwards, he doesn't bother to report on declassified findings that tend to support pre-war arguments about the nature of the regime we deposed in the invasion. And while Keller and his rabid band of partisan reporters demand to get details of secret programs that have kept this country safe for almost five years, he cannot be bothered to request the declassification of a known report on WMD that may show much more extensive stocks still in Iraq than previously revealed.

That certainly seems relevant -- and yet the Times could not care less. It doesn't support their war against the war, after all, and so therefore the public has no interest in it, as decided by Bill Keller. Andy McCarthy wrote about this effort yesterday at NRO, and his essay calls Keller and his ilk out in an articulate indictment that only this former prosecutor could create:

Appealing to the patriotism of these newspapers proved about as promising as appealing to the humanity of the terrorists they so insouciantly edify — the same monsters who, as we saw again only a few days ago with the torture murder of two American soldiers, continue to define depravity down.

The newspapers, of course, said no. Why? What could outweigh the need to protect a valid effort to shield Americans from additional, barbarous attacks? Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, smugly decreed that the Bush administration’s “access to this vast repository of international financial data” was, in his singularly impeccable judgment, “a matter of public interest.”

And you probably thought George Bush was the imperious one. And that the public’s principal interest was in remaining alive. Wrong again.

The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.

The anti-warriors know only the language of self-interest. It is the language that tells them the revelation of the nation’s secrets will result, forthwith, in the demand for the revelation of their secrets — which is to say, their sources in the intelligence community — with incarceration the price of resistance. It is the language admonishing that even journalists themselves may be prosecuted when their publication of national secrets violates the law.

NRO remains a vital part of the resistance to this effort. Be sure to read both essays in their entirety to remain in contact with the front lines.

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