Disgraceful

The NY Times Public Editor now says the Times was wrong when it disclosed the nature of the SWIFT program that the Bush Administration was using to track terror-related financial transactions:

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

Thanks, Byron. I for one, however, would have appreciated the attack of conscience before you all decided to publish the piece, not after several months of soul-searching.

Don't get me wrong; it's nice that you have a conscience of course, but it's meaningless if it doesn't keep you from making poor decisions.

Tom Maguire with his thoughts here.