Transcript for July 2

MS. MITCHELL: Well, isn’t it true that, in fact, this program was hinted at in the 9/11 commission report, and both NBC analyst Roger Cressey, who is a former national security official, and his fellow former NSC officer Richard Clarke said that no harm was done. Let’s look at what they wrote in The New York Times about this. “Wildly overblown ... are the Bush administration’s protests that the press revelations about the financial monitoring program may tip off the terrorists. ... They want the public to believe that it had not already occurred to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored and his international bank transfers subject to scrutiny. How gullible does the administration take the American citizenry to be?” Bill Safire...

MR. BENNETT: Well...

MS. MITCHELL: ...does the press have an obligation...

MR. BENNETT: ...is that it? Is that it for me?

MS. MITCHELL: No. No. Stand by. I want to ask Bill Safire to weigh in on this.

MR. WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, here we are...

MS. MITCHELL: Bill, does the press have an obligation to print or not in this case? And were they giving away state secrets?

MR. SAFIRE: Look, I don’t speak for the Times. I’ve been in the Times for 30 years disagreeing with Times editorial policy right down the line. On this one, I think they did the right thing. Here we are on Independence Day weekend, 230 years ago, celebrating what was the resistance to a king who said “We’re going to hang you for treason.” And here we have a Long Island congressman, happens to be named King, who’s saying “treason” and “put these reporters in jail.” I think there’s a big fundamental thing going on here now, and across the board, of “get the press, get the media.” And, look, I used to write speeches for Spiro Agnew, I’m hip to this stuff, and, and I can say that it gives you a blip, it gives you a chance to get on the offensive against the, the darned media. But in the long view of history, it’s a big mistake.

MS. MITCHELL: But is the...

MR. JOHN HARWOOD: This is what I don’t get. The people who killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, who murdered Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal, commit atrocities every day in Iraq, are evil, but they’re not stupid, and I don’t understand the logic that says all of a sudden they’ve discovered something they didn’t know. September 24, 2001, President Bush walked into the Rose Garden and announced, “We’ve developed a strategy, we’re putting banks and financial institutions around the world on, on notice. We’ll work with their governments, freeze or block terrorists’ money. We’re going to work with the United Nations, the EU, the G8 to follow this money.” How...

MS. MITCHELL: But, John, what Bill Bennett would say to you is that they didn’t know about the so-called SWIFT program, they didn’t know the specifics. Bill...

MR. HARWOOD: Well, where hat did we, where hat did we think? Did they say “We’re looking for money”?

MR. BENNETT: Well, why did they, why did they get caught on 2003 rather than two years earlier when the program was announced? I know we have an air marshals program, but I don’t know which marshal is on which plane. Yeah, we established a democracy, we, we opposed a king, we have a president of the United States. The founders, let me go back 200 years, James Wilson said “The press will be free. No prior restraint on the press. However, when they err, when they are irresponsible, they should be held accountable.” Now, you put Richard Clarke up against Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean. I’m sorry, Richard Clarke has a thing against this administration, that’s pretty clearly known. Tom Kean said a—the details of a valuable program were lost.

MS. MITCHELL: Well, he worked for a while in this administration.

MR. BENNETT: Lee Hamilton said the same thing, Jack Murtha—these, again, are not cat’s paws of this administration—begged The New York Times not to run this piece.

MS. DANA PRIEST: You know, Andrea, the administration...

MS. MITCHELL: Yes, Dana?

MS. PRIEST: Every time there’s a national security story they don’t want published, they say it will damage national security. But they—for one thing, they’ve never given us any proof. They say it will stop cooperation, but the fact is that the countries of the world understand that they have to cooperate on counterterrorism. And just like the banks that did not pull out of the system, other countries continue to cooperate, because it’s a common problem.

MS. MITCHELL: But, Dana...

MR. HARWOOD: Have you heard...(unintelligible)...are pulling out from this system? I don’t think so.

MS. MITCHELL: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize—you for that story and Jim Risen and others for another story—were, “not worthy of an award but rather worthy of jail.” Dana, how do you plead?

MS. PRIEST: Well, it’s not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can’t publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.

Now why isn’t it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn’t it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight, and you can’t do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena. To do a better job—and I believe that we should’ve done a better job—we would’ve again, found ourselves in the arena of...

MS. MITCHELL: But, we’ve now had a steady drum beat from the White House all week about this, as you’ve pointed out. Here’s what the president and the vice president have been saying on the stump at campaign events.

(Videotape, Wednesday):

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: Last week, the details of this program appeared in the press. There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it, and no excuse for any newspaper to print it.

(End videotape)

(Videotape, Monday):

VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: The leaks to The New York Times and the publishing of those leaks is very damaging.

What is doubly disturbing for me is that not only have they gone forward with these stories, but they’ve been rewarded for it—for example, in the case of the terrorist surveillance program—by being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalist. I think that is a disgrace.

(End videotape)

MS. MITCHELL: John, is this policy of trying to use the press as a whipping boy going to work to excite the conservative base and to turn voters out in the midterm elections?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, Republicans certainly think so. They—if you’re a Republican in the White House or in Congress, would you rather talk about immigration, gas prices, the estate tax, all the things that you can’t get done right now, or would you rather go after The New York Times, the Supreme Court on the Guantanamo ruling—we’ll talk about that later—and make hay and say “They’re tying our hands in the war on terrorism”? It’s obvious they’d rather do the latter, and they love this discussion. They’re going to love it even more if Congress takes up legislation on Guantanamo.

MS. MITCHELL: This is, this is clearly not something new. Let me show you a tape from 1992.

(Videotape, October 22, 1992):

PRES. GEORGE BUSH: Here’s my favorite bumper sticker of all, “Annoy the media, re-elect Bush.”

(End videotape)

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