State Persecution

Mike, if you're still reading the paper, the United States hasn't found the weapons of mass destruction that were the reason the country went to war in Iraq. I would have called and told you the news personally, but you were so angry at The Bee, you hung up before giving me your last name and phone number. The last thing you said was that you were canceling your subscription. Mike was one of...

Let me come forward and speak up for The New York Times. No, I'm not saying I necessarily would have published its story on a program to track terror financing, a story that has put the paper again at the center of a furious storm. But I know from experience that it's almost impossible to put yourself into an editor's shoes, to know all the factors that went into such a decision. Sometimes...

For those who enjoy a summer blockbuster, the dust-up between the Bush Administration and The New York Times has been a real clash of the Titans, a bare-knuckle brawl between the press and the White House. We haven't seen the likes of this since Spiro Agnew labeled the press "nattering nabobs of negativism" back in the Nixon Administration. It's a controversy that defies easy answers or a safe...

Happy Independence Day. In between grilling, lawn mowing and fireworks watching, take a few minutes to secure your right to know what your government is doing, a cornerstone of our freedom. The best way I can think of doing so in today's America is to go out and buy a copy of the New York Times. Or subscribe. But one way or another, pay for it, regularly. Right now, more than any other...

The story that most aroused N&O readers in the past week has to do with the press and national security. When is it appropriate for newspapers to publish information that could jeopardize our common safety and well-being? The question arises from the disclosure in The New York Times and other national papers, and reported subsequently in The News & Observer, that the government is monitoring an...

THE Bush administration's unusually harsh attacks on The New York Times for exposing a secret banking-data surveillance program have turned a glaring spotlight on the paper's decision to publish the article. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Republican legislators have singled out The Times in recent days for disclosing the counterterrorism program, even though The Los Angeles Times and...

MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing. They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response. The decision to publish this...

Every passing week, it becomes more apparent that disgruntled leftists in the intelligence community and antiwar crusaders in the mainstream media, annealed in their disdain for the Bush administration, are undermining our ability to win the War on Terror. Their latest body blow to the war effort is the exposure, principally by the New York Times, of the Treasury Department’s top-secret program to...

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration yesterday to seek criminal charges against newspapers that reported on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) cited the New York Times in particular for publishing a report last week saying that the Treasury Department is working with the CIA to examine an...

The following is a letter Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, has sent to readers who have written to him about The Times's publication of information about the government's examination of international banking records: I don't always have time to answer my mail as fully as etiquette demands, but our story about the government's surveillance of international banking records has...