Bush or Keller?Who do you trust?
Posted Thursday, July 6, 2006, at 10:56 PM ET
When governments acquire emergency powers during wartime, it's with the understanding that the crisis is finite and that when the war ends the government will relinquish those powers. But what happens when a government defines its war as neverending, as the Bush administration has its so-called "war on terror"? As long as any jihadist anywhere threatens the West, the administration would have us believe, we must trust it and remain in a wartime crouch.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponThe current conflict will soon conclude its fifth year, making it longer than the war against Japan. Most of the temporary powers in the PATRIOT Act that had been scheduled for "sunset" were extended, and the administration has conjured secret powers not directly spelled out by legislation. The New York Times revealed one such example of administration overreach last December when it reported the secret NSA surveillance program. Two weeks ago the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported—over administration objections—the secret sifting of SWIFT bank transaction data by the CIA and Treasury Department, which the White House justifies under 1977 economic sanctions legislation.
In reporting the SWIFT story, both papers rejected the White House assertion that disclosure was improper. The president and the vice president condemned both papers, and an exploding carbuncle masquerading as a member of Congress called upon the attorney general to investigate the New York Times under the Espionage Act, the Comint Act, and "other relevant federal criminal statutes."
Of course, overriding a presidential request doesn't make New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet traitors. The whooping by the administration and its allies, however, does signal the breakdown of the traditional comity—I wouldn't call it "trust"—that has existed between the White House and the press. Since the end of WWII, the press has sought White House input whenever its reporters bumped up against issues of national security, and if the press has erred it's mostly erred in favor of the government position. For a good summary of recent instances in which the two Timeses and the Washington Post have held stories or deleted sensitive information at the administration's request, see Keller and Baquet's joint op-ed from last week defending publication of their SWIFT stories.
If the press isn't being reckless, then why the breakdown? Why now?
The Keller-Baquet op-ed explains how the process ordinarily works: Publications approach the White House when they have sensitive stories about classified programs and ask for comment. "And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages," they write.
In an open society such as ours, it's up to the White House to convince the editors not to publish. I claim no inside knowledge about why talks between the administration and the Timeses cratered. Gauging from the White House's fury, I suspect that it either failed to make a plausible case for keeping the program secret or didn't want to make a case.
If the administration failed to make the case, my guess is that it's opted to mask its failure by fouling relations with the press. If it didn't want to make the case, its petulance would be understandable if not forgivable. The press has been running the table against the administration when it comes to publishing stories about classified programs. A couple of weeks before the SWIFT revelations broke, Washington Post Associate Editor Robert G. Kaiser catalogued a variety of scoops that I bet an all-power Bush administration would have liked to suppress in the name of national security—the Abu Ghraib outrages; the United States' rendition of terrorism suspects to countries where torture is commonplace; its secret prisons in Eastern Europe; the NSA's eavesdropping without warrants; and the surreptitious harvesting of phone logs, just to name the big ones. A couple of those stories were published after head-butting conversations between the press and the White House, so you know the White House has to be angry.
Whatever its mood, the administration may have found it politically expedient at this juncture, just before the fall elections, to cultivate a domestic perception that the New York Times is as much an enemy as al-Qaida. This assumes, of course, that the administration hasn't cast the press as the enemy from the beginning. There's no better illustration of Bush's disdain than former Chief of Staff Andrew Card's 2004 comment to The New Yorker's Ken Auletta that the press "don't represent the public any more than other people do. … I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function."
I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act, but at least Congress approved it and its extensions. As Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Tribune wrote Thursday, Congress "took pains to fit [the PATRIOT Act] within established laws and Supreme Court decisions. It required judges to sign off on the use of various investigative tools." He continues, "critics can take consolation that it paid deference to the constitutional separation of powers, to established precedents on presidential prerogatives and to the value of open debate."
So, if Bush thinks the government needs stronger measures to scrutinize financial transactions beyond what the multitudinous laws on the books already allow, his party should introduce new legislation. If he thinks investigators need more leeway in monitoring American phone conversations, let him introduce another bill. If he believes our national security requires nameless dungeons for terror suspects around the world, let him openly request that authority.
But instead of convening such a debate, Bush wants us to trust him. I'd rather trust Bill Keller.
******
Send e-mail to . Send legislation to Congress. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
The Tiger-Obama Cover Golf Digest Wishes It Could Unprint
Four Reasons The Blind Side Nearly Toppled New Moon
AOL's Plan To Flood the Web With Idiotic Celebrity Content
Amazing Photos of Obama's Secret Service Agents at Work
If You Want To Fix Darfur, Fix Chad First
A Close Reading of the Victoria's Secret Christmas Catalog
Remarks from the Fray:
We elect our representatives. Owners of the NYTimes are hereditary, at this point. The press is not 'elected.' It is a body that attempts to influence, not represent, public opinion. It provides information to the public in return for its shot at telling you what to believe.
So, does it represent the public? No. The President, Congress, in fact the whole government, is meant to do that. The press is not. [...]
Andrew Card was correct. Any offense taken must have been because the press has a bizarrely inflated internal misrepresentation of itself - in terms of power, position, official capacity, role, and, in the end, relationship to the masses.
--BenK
(To reply, click here.)
Was it really appropriate for the New York Times to reveal what it knew about the government's illegal spying on the wire transfers of overseas transactions between our nation's business people? Yes, because it was and is an illegal activity by our government. Again, had it been necessary for the Bush Administration to possess this extraordinary power it could have and should have gone through Congress, the body explicitly developed to create new laws, even though this would let the secrecy cat out of the bag. [...]
There seems to be something at the core of the arch-conservative philosophy that makes these people insist that the answer to any exterior threat is to begin spying on the private business of their own citizens. Not to conduct the bare minimum necessary to do a dirty and regretful job but to go way over the top to joyfully embrace the concept of wiretapping and peeking in on aspects of private or on business lives that do not remotely have anything to do with the enemy's activities.
Sadly we have a rogue executive branch and about the only thing keeping our remaining privacy and civil rights intact is the watchdog activities of big business news organizations—those not already partly or wholly suborned by this government, that is.
--Rusty_Sharpe
(To reply, click here.)
A once great newspaper man succumbs to the urge to defend industry comrades at all costs. The wagons have been circled and warning shots fired. Its too bad. I am certain that in future years his statement that he would confer power to assess national security secrets on an unelected editor of a newspaper over the president of the U.S. will prove an enduring embarassment for him. [...]
Shafer says that, based on "the White House's fury", he thinks "that it either failed to make a plausible case for keeping the program secret or didn't want to make a case." No such inference is logical from the WH's reaction. A better, but unstated by Shafer, inference is anger that a useful tool has been needlessly rendered moot. Journalists ignoring obvious issues in this manner is what leads so many people to distrust them, but they just can't seem to help themselves. [...]
Jack, how about a little scrutiny of your supposed hero's actions? Keller purported to balance some public interest against the damage to the SWIFT program that would ensue. Yet, since disclosure we have heard real evidence that the program worked and was legal. On the other scale, all the NYT has been able to come up with is some abstract public interest. The populace has determined that that rationale won't fly if it has a chance of abetting terrorists. Disingenuously couching the reaction as a political move by opponents won't change that.
--Quint
(To reply, click here.)
This bank data sifting is the least controversial of the secret programs disclosed by the Times. Indeed, it wasn't even really secret! The Administration described similar efforts back in 2001.
So the White House doesn't mind calling attention to this story by attacking the Times; they know most of the public is not upset about this particular program. Furthermore, attacking the Times suggests that this program was highly secret and sensitive-- suggests, in other words, that the White House is really doing its job in the war on terror. In other words, the longer this story is in the press, the better it is for the White House.
--c-p-bell
(To reply, click here.)
Bush sees himself not as the steward of democracy, but as the Captain of the SS USA. In fact, he's neither; just another tin-hatted would-be dictator. He is deeply offended when his "judgment"--which is worse than that of the average adult US citizen--is questioned, and can barely be bothered to offer an adult explanation of his policies. [...]
As for the Times, [...] after, their meritless jihad against the Clintons on Whitewater, their persecution of the Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos, and their shameless backing of the execrable Judith Miller--not to mention their revolting abuse of Gore and Kerry during the past 2 campaigns--the Times is little more than propaganda sheet for the right.
--PurposePitch
(To reply, click here.)
Remember "Jane Eyre"? There is a scene where the orphanage where Jane is being abused is going to be inspected by the supervising minister. So, first thing when he arrives, the woman in charge, Jane's abuser-in-chief, meets with the minister and warns him, "One thing that's a problem here is that we have a girl who is an inveterate liar---you can't believe a word she says". Thus if Jane tries to tell the preacher she's being abused, she won't be believed. And if the credibility of the Times is destroyed they won't be believed when they expose information that makes the White House look bad.
Bill Moyer says "The news is what people want to keep secret. Everything else is public relations". It is not the job of the press to do PR for the White House.
--SmallVoice
(To reply, click here.)
(7/8)