Still The One

Last week's revelation of the secret US government program to monitor financial transactions of terrorists was disturbing for a number of reasons. For me personally, the fact that Wall Street Journal was one of the newspapers involved in reporting on the program was especially hard to take. While I would expect nothing less from the likes of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, I had always believed that the Journal, my precious Journal, my last best hope for newspapers, was different.

On Friday, after a week of silence, the Journal finally cleared the air on the matter in an editorial published Friday (available to all) and restored my faith:

Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized.

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not. Mr. Keller's argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

The Wall Street Journal: one of the few American newspapers that one can still subscribe to with a clear conscience.