[Peace-discuss] Corrupt journalism, esp. the NYT

[C. G. Estabrook]

   December 17 / 18, 2005
   The New York Times and the NSA's Illegal Spying Operation
   By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

   "The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and
most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and
instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common
property of the nation. The statesman collects his information
secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current
intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions The Press
lives by disclosures For us, with whom publicity and truth are
the air and light of existence, there can be no greater
disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure
of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we
find it, without fear of consequences -- to lend no convenient
shelter to acts of injustice or oppression, but to consign
them at once to the judgement of the world."
   --Robert Lowe, editorial, London Times, 1851.

Lowe's magnificent editorial was written in response to the
claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to
share the influence of statesmen it "must also share in the
responsibilities of statesmen". It's a long, sad decline from
what Lowe wrote in 1851 to the disclosure by the New York
Times on Friday that it sat for over a year on a story
revealing that the Bush administration had sanctioned a
program of secret, illegal spying on US citizens here in the
Homeland, by the National Security Agency.

And when it comes to zeal in protecting the Bill of Rights,
between December 22, 1974 and December 16, 2005 it's been a
steady run down hill for the New York Times. Thirty-one years
ago, almost to the day, here's how Seymour Hersh's lead, on
the front page of the NYT, began:

    "The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its
charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence
operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar
movement and other dissident groups in the United States,
according to well-placed Government sources."

And here's the lead paragraph of the NYT's page one story this
Friday by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau:

    "Months after the September 11 attacks, President Bush
secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop
on Americans and others inside the United States to search for
evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved
warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to
government officials."

Government illegality is the sinew of Hersh's first sentence.
He says that that what the CIA did was illegal and that it
violated the CIA's charter. What the NSA has been doing is
also illegal. Its warrantless domestic eavesdropping is in
direct violation of the 1978 law which came about as a direct
result of Hersh's expose and the congressional hearings that
followed. The eavesdropping it also violates the NSA's
charter, which gives the Agency no mandate to conduct domestic
surveillance.

Yet in Friday's story it wasn't until the end of the third
paragraph that Risen and Lichtblau wrote timidly that "Some
officials familiar with the continuing operation have
questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not
crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches."

In the eighth paragraph of Risen and Lichtblau's story comes
the shameful disclosure alluded to above:

    "The White House asked the New York Times not to publish
this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing
investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might
be understand scrutiny. After meeting with senior
administration officials, the newspaper delayed publication
for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information
that administration officials argued could be useful to
terrorists has been omitted."

Hersh put the word "massive" in his first sentence, and drew
undeserved fire for exaggerating the extent of surveillance,
which a presidential panel finally admitted was "considerable
large-scale substantial". Risen and Lichtblau shirk any direct
estimate of how big the NSA's domestic spying has been, though
one can deduce from the ninth paragraph of the story that
probably many thousands of people had their phone
conversations, and emails and faxes illegally spied upon by
the NSA.

The Times suggests that it held up the story for a year partly
to do "additional reporting". This "additional reporting"
seems to have yielded sparse results. Friday's story was
extremely long, but pretty thin, once the basic fact of NSA
eavesdropping had been presented. The year's work doesn't seem
taken the reporters beyond what was urgently leaked to them in
2004 by twelve different government officials concerned about
the illegality of what the NSA was doing and the lack of
congressional oversight.

Indeed, Friday's Washington Post had a much more compact story
by Dan Eggan that not only stressed the illegality in its
first paragraph but had material that Risen and Lichtblau
missed, namely that the NSA had begun its illegal program
right after 9/11, even before Bush signed the executive order
okaying the surveillance, some time in 2002. It was Eggan who
reported that faxes had also been spied upon by the NSA.

And again, it was Eggan in the Post who put the NSA story in a
larger context, namely the fact that in the past week the
Pentagon has been forced to admit that military intelligence
agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency have also
been illegally surveilling US citizens within the US.

In the TALON Program (Threat and Local Observation Notice) a
Pentagon unit called Counter Intelligence Field Activity
(CEFA) has been amassing thousands of files on potential
threats to US military installations. Many of the subjects of
these files have turned out to be antiwar groups and
anti-recruiting activists. For example, when CIA director
George Tenet visited as campus and encountered protests, the
CEFA unit would immediately open files on the protesters. The
unit was supposed to purge its files of all names and
organizations caught in its drift nets that failed to meet the
test of being any form of threat. But of course no such purge
took place.

Eggan also reported that "Teams of Defense Intelligence Agency
personnel stationed in major US cities [have been] conducting
the type of surveillance typically performed by the FBI:
monitoring the movements and activities -- through high tech
equipment of individuals and vehicles."

The impression one gets from the Washington Post story is that
the Bush administration had given the green light to a truly
massive program of warrantless domestic surveillance by the
NSA and military agencies. The New York Times reporters
suggested no such context, setting the spying activities in a
more forgiving light, as part of the war on terror.

Who designed this policy? Deep in the Times story hardy
readers trudging through Risen and Lichtblau's leaden prose
would have tripped over vice president Cheney's name in the
twenty-fifth paragraph where he is described as bringing
congressional leaders to his office to brief them on the
program. Only at the very end of the story, in the
forty-eighth paragraph do such readers as have survived the
trek learn that the legal brief justifying this onslaught on
the US Constitution was written by Professor John Yoo, at that
time at the Department of Justice. Such readers would not have
learned -- as they did from the Washington Post -- that Yoo
had written the notorious memos justifying torture. The Times
didn't make it clear that Cheney and Yoo were key players in
the Administration's insistence that the Executive Branch has
the inherent powers to sanction domestic spying without
oversight from either of the other two branches of the government.

In fact members of Congress, aside from Senator Jay
Rockefeller, raised no demur. It was the judiciary, in the
form of the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding over the
secret intelligence court established by FISA, who reprimanded
Justice Department lawyers for trying to get legal warrants
from her, using as "probable cause" data from the illegal
surveillance, although not admitting this.

In fact it's something of a puzzle why the Times finally did
publish the story, after sitting on the information leaked to
it by the NSA officials worried that they might get prosecuted
for illegal surveillance. It is true that Friday's publication
came in the closing hours of the battle in the US Senate over
reauthorization of the Patriot Act. And its probably true that
the publication of the story pushed enough wavering senators
into the ranks of those who on Friday successfully fought to
get the bill shelved, in a major defeat for the White House.

It's also true that all year Risen has been hard at work on a
book about the conduct of US intelligence agencies in the "war
on terror" after 9/11, slated for release next spring. The
book's launch will no doubt be accompanied by some new
disclosure by Risen, designed to give the book lift up the
charts. Perhaps that too will be a story he's been keeping in
the larder for months.

This lamentable synergy featured in Bob Woodward's
journalistic calculations and also in the promotional
circumstances of the book written by Judith Miller, Stephen
Engelberg and William Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and
America's Secret War., The Times front-paged her stories in
the paper in a manner designed to push the book up into
Bestseller status. It was a clear conflict of interest that
earned the paper plenty of money. This was when Miller was
sent that envelope of white powder that turned out not to be
anthrax spores, which gave the book yet another boost.

Risen, we should remind our readers, is one of the reporters
who smeared the late Gary Webb with the charge that Webb had
overhyped his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series on the
CIA/contra/cocaine connexions. Webb didn't pace his
disclosures to suit a book-writing schedule. He only wrote his
book after he'd been forced out of his job.

CounterPunch readers may also recall that Risen was one of the
New York Times reporters, along with Jeff Gerth, who raced
into print with baseless smears that cost Wen Ho Lee almost a
year of his life in solitary confinement, being threatened
with the death penalty by FBI interrogators. On that occasion
Risen and Gerth didn't wait a year to do additional reporting
and fact checking. They rushed to do the government's bidding
(relaying the smears of an Energy Department official who had
it in for Wen Ho Lee) just as Risen and the New York Times
clicked their heels in the NSA case, sitting on an explosive
story through the 2004 election and for months thereafter, and
even then agreeing to withhold certain facts.

Such submissiveness on the part of the Times harks back to
self censorship by the paper in the early 1950s, covering up
CIA plans for coups in Guatemala and Iran; also to the paper's
behavior in 1966 when it had information about IA shenanigans
in Singapore and through south-east Asia. The editors
submitted the story for review by CIA director John McCone,
who made editorial deletions.

In its Friday story, the New York Times meekly agreed not to
identify the "senior White House official" who successfully
petitioned them to spike the story for a year. The fact that
no one was specifically named allowed Bush to discount the
entire story when he went the Lehrer News Hour on Friday evening. 

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