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Originally Posted by dculkin
Without seeing the Times article, it is hard to make any judgment. Is the Times the only paper to have reported on this story? Of all the possible reasons for the Times runing the story, treason is the least likely, IMHO. It sounds more like Mr. Turner is just doing his best to support the Bush administration's thought police program. The thought police initiative started early in W's first term with Ari Fleischer saying that people need to be careful about what they say and has carried forward to their recent demands that Newsweek do some reporting to undo the harm supposedly caused by its Koran story. The effort to control what American people see, hear, read, and think got some recent support from the Human Events website with its list of "dangerous" books.
I don't know this guy Turner or his organization, TCS, so it's hard to judge his motivation.
I assume that you have read the NY Times article, so perhaps you could link to it for us. |
I read the Times article in my favorite local coffee shop, and I also subscribe to a TCS (
www.techcentralstation.com) newsletter, so I just saw their commentary on it this afternoon, and I agree with the author's sentiments: Regardless of what may or may not be the paper's primary motivation for publishing the article, there is NO good reason, journalistic or otherwise, for them to include information that makes it easier for someone to identify aircraft chartered by our military, or to anticipate their travel plans and/or routes. This is information that does not serve the public interest, it is not information that contributes to the clarity, readability, or overall merit of the article, and publishing it potentially increases the risks to our soldiers and/or the private contractors they use. There are very legitimate reasons that our military tries to keep such information to themselves, and the Times, or anyone else, has no business digging it up and putting it out there for our enemies to exploit.
This is not a "censorship" or "thought police" issue. It is a common sense issue.
Mike