Cancelling subscriptions to NYT, boycotting their advertisers, and generally publicizing their shame is OK for them, but . . .

NSA staff who carried out these illegal orders must also be prosecuted (particularly since some of them refused to do carry them out, citing their illegality). Prosecuting them is an essential step in preparing for the impeachment of him who gave the orders.

Also, all who know themselves to have been illegally eavesdropped should take advantage of the provision of the law that permits civil lawsuits against the eavesdroppers and recovery of punitive damages.

Orion

Coincidental.

I think the two, taken together, suggest that the NYT was willing to do whatever they could to ingratiate themselves with Dick and his minions.

~pockets

The three estates had a pretty important role in the French Revolution. It was the insistence that the bourgeois third estate get a say that started the whole thing off.

And actually, many of our ideas of how the press is supposed to work as the fourth estate derive from the French R, although there are important precursors to the Cromwell era in England.

ew – The Iraqi â€elections†should be the headlines for the propagandists right now. Yet the fascists spying is now the story. We have seen stories the fascists want to be the top story replaced by stories they have to defend. Are the media (legitimately) trying to make up for the past by undermining the fascists now? Or is it just more mind f***s from both camps on the public?

IMO, at least for the last three months, since Bush/Rove began actively trying strategies to distance themselves/scapegoat Cheney, the London Tube bombings probably played a significant role in the NYT’ calculus with respect to their negotiations to print this story. Since Cheney has had to a chance to taste the Bush/Rove medicine for low poll numbers, I speculate that Cheney’s view of the story the NYT had changed into exactly what you describe it as. You do not state specifically that Cheney/OVP orchestrated the timing of this article for maximum damage to Bush. You probably have very good reasons for the way you left it, but I am interested.

I imagine that many of your readers are as thrilled as I am that you are fixing the responsibility for these unethical decisions at the NYT above the level of â€reporter,†Ms. Kornblut, and placing it with â€squishy†editors and even more responsibility on the lawyers, executives, and Arthur Sulzberger. Froomkin, Dana Priest, Ann Kornblut and their ilk are the best hope for the MSM.

â€Now, it seems the proper thing to do at this point would have been to tell Fitzgerald Libby was trying to coach testimony.â€
If you get a chance, I would be interested in your take about the responsibility of the attorneys at the NYT â€to tell Fitzgerald.†The NYT’s attorneys are getting rich off of all their billings for â€negotiations†about Judy, and â€negotiations†about the Bush lied story and many more we probably don’t know about. Didn’t these attorneys have an obligation to inform NYT in writing that it was their legal advice that the NYT inform Fitzgerald that â€Libby was trying to coach testimony. It seems this coaching should have made Judy and the NYT aware that Judy wasn’t protecting the First Amendment, but was protecting someone who was actively hiding criminal behavior.â€

Since the NYT apparently did not follow inform Fitzgerald, if you have the time and the inclination I am interested in what the NYT’s lawyer’s responsibility was/is to inform Fitzgerald, in their capacity as “officers of the court.†Would it irreparably break their professional ethics to write a private letter to Fitzgerald or with respect to the Bush spied story, Eliot Spitzer, or a Judge, or a U.S. Senator, or the New York State Bar?

OT: Scotty Pottie McClellan yesterday in his WH News Baffling, I mean briefing, stated that there had been oversight by the Senate for Bush’s spying, meaning, â€blame it on the Democrats, they knew all about this.†I am hoping this strategy does not work as well for the WH as it did with respect to the War.
OT: Bush’s declaration in 2004 about the â€cessation of hostilities†in Iraq now may loom as a pretty large event with respect to Bush’s spying. His comment pulled us back significantly from a â€War footing,†in the political/legal context. I wonder if the Senate can make the claim that this â€erosion†of our civil liberties was significantly less defensible after Bush’s declaration.

My guess is that the story saw the light of day finally because someone at the Times who was aware that the story was being held back threatened to take it somewhere else. (Indeed, the way the Times story was covered by the Post suggests that they had some advance warning.)

Although the reason â€push came to shove†was the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the VERY late release of the story suggests that Keller was perfectly willing to have the Patriot Act authorized without publishing. The story is central to the issues that make the Patriot Act controversial — and should have been released weeks, if not months ago.

Its one thing to hold onto a story based on rather insubstantial â€national security concerns†in the face of a Presidential election — the provisions of the Patriot Act, and the question of spying on US citizens, was not a major issue in the campaign. Its an entirely different thing to withhold the story when it has a direct bearing on a controversial issue being discussed and voted on by Congress.

The story should have been released prior to hearings on the Patriot Act reauthorization. It absolutely should have been released prior to the House vote. Waiting until the 11th hour — until the day the Senate was ready to vote on it — strongly suggests that the Times never had any intention of letting this information out before more damage was done to our rights.

Now, it seems the proper thing to do at this point would have been to tell Fitzgerald Libby was trying to coach testimony.

I have to disagree, though it wouldn’t change the end result. Newspapers aren’t supposed to be an arm of law enforcement, and the NYT had no obligation to specifically drop a dime on Libby to Fitzgerald.

But newspapers ARE supposed to inform their readers of what is going on, and the fact that a Plame witness was suborning another witness – an NYT reporter, no less – to perjury is newsworthy.

I doubt that confidentiality agreements extend that far anyway, but the NYT didn’t even have to name names. Just saying that an unnamed witness was trying to spin another unnamed witness would have told us plenty.

Sure, as a byproduct it would have told Fitz just about everything, but that only shows that if you have an independent press, even prosecutors can read it in the paper.

– Rick

Rick

Alright, you’ve convinced me. They failed their duty to US.

This was the last straw for me. The NYTimes doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing they print is of any value nor trustworthy in any way. I refuse to read anything that comes out of the butts of their reporters.

If ANY of the so-called â€reporters†(or is it stenographers?) at the NYTimes have ANY ethics or pride they would quit now. The fact that they aren’t quitting speaks volumes. They are ALL liars and unethical puppets and pansies.

Laura Rozen has a couple of posts to the effect that James Risen, one of the authors of the NYT story, was coming out with a book, to be published in January. Do we have some sort of Woodward-in-reverse here where the paper decides it better get a story out before the book makes them look completely lame? Or is the release timed to boost sales of the book? What is the relationship of the Times to the publisher?

Marshall also shows the utter speciousness and phoniness of the Bush rationale for this program–the FISA court is set up to act expeditiously, and, in any event, wiretaps can begin on an emergency basis as long as a retroactive warrant is sought within 72 hours from this court which is specifically set up to be expeditious and friendly.

And, as Laura also asks, what on earth were they going to do with the info? Couldn’t use it in court. Could use it to capture someone and declare him an enemy combatant, ship him off to Gitmo or one of the gulag prisons for torture, but what then? It is all so useless, so utterly useless. It only makes more problems for them. So what was it about? Macho power, making Cheney and Bush and Jphn Yoo feel good and big? Or real domestic spying that they would use against their political enemies, not in a court of law, but through leaks and blackmail?

How close we are to a police state.

Do we have some sort of Woodward-in-reverse here where the paper decides it better get a story out before the book makes them look completely lame? Or is the release timed to boost sales of the book? What is the relationship of the Times to the publisher?

Here’s a guess. Risen was forced to sit on the story for a year by Keller. Risen couldn’t just go to another paper with the story, but what he could do is tell another paper that his book was coming out in January, and that story was in it.

Which he told Keller he was going to do, which got the story in the Times finally.

The existence of Risen’s book raises even more questions about Keller’s actions. It meant that there was NO REASON not to publish the story once he knew that Risen was writing a book that contained the information. But Keller doesn’t make a move until the very last minute….

let me suggest why you do not go before a FISA court, no matter how supportive –

if you go before a court you leave a record, a secret record to be sure, but a record nontheless.

i’m wiling to bet the bush spying program was designed not to leave any record other than at NSA, which is a fortress nearly impossible to get any info out of.

so why do an end run around FISA in order to leave no record?

well, supopose that you wanted to know what your domestic political opponents were planing or saying in private.

suppose you wanted to know what diplomats supposedly protected by diplomatic immunity were saying or planning.

suppose you wanted to know what was being said or planned at the united nations in new york

suppose you were looking for some democratic legislators who had fled texas

suppose you wanted to learn opponents campaign strategems.

suppose the secret service could be used as a foil for justifying these activities

how to rule out these possiblites?

well

(help me out here)

maybe a statement to the effect that any and all eavesdroping activity was related directly to a specific threatened act of terrorism

or maybe a statement (under oath is better, no) that no domestic political activities of any kind were included in this spying program, even incidentally.

if a president would use a prompting device in presidential debates,

why wouldn’t he use NSA to gain an advantage on his political opponents?

i’m betting this program not only did not stop at terrorism, but was really never designed with terrorism in mind.

Just the other day I saw a cinematic reminder of how little has changed over the years—and so of how thorough we must try to be now in cleaning up the mess.

Seems in the movie, set around 1955, there’s this file-stealing secretary for The New York Times (wish I could use the logo-type there) who â€gets things†for an exceptionally disreputable private eye of her acquaintance. From my memory:

The dyke in Archiving’s getting suspicious. My boss hasn’t researched a story in years.

The movie, of course, is Angel Heart. But enough about the press—let’s all start writing up our own bill of impeachment particulars, shall we? It’s a real mind-clearing exercise.

People are getting tired of this impeachment stuff, Justina, though the gentlemen and lady may have misestimated the eight-year timeline for getting their agenda enacted and departing office gracefully; if enough evidence is extruded into the public realm, perhaps; EW is certainly helping that from the discovery and strategy perspectives. Often I think EW is STRICT toward the NYT, but if any news entity has the conscience and intelligence to hear EW and correct course, it is NYT. On the voting debacle, you may be informed there is a suit filed in NC to obtain a TRO against the recent NC reversal of its decision not to certify one manufacturer’s machine, for insufficient quantities of software consigned to the state for underwriting. That legal realm is a peril, at least in some attorneys’ view, in that the federal Independent Test agencies which examine the software apparently rely too much on manufacturer’s guarantees and states’ hodgepodge purchasing processes to screen out such backdoor weaknesses as, say, using portable handheld device software with known bugs as a module in a voting machine. Check about the third article on the news page at Electronic Frontier for a link to a copy of the petition in NC filed apparently December 8, 2005. Websites discussing that important topic in my experience take a lot of interpretation, as they tend toward the political where perhaps an increment of equanimity would serve better.