Jim Comey Bullies NYT to Stop Publishing Anonymous Claims about Drone Killings

/7 Comments/in , /by

Best as I can tell, the FBI Director has officially told the NYT to stop republishing anonymous government claims about drone strikes anymore.

“Your decision to grant anonymity to a spokesperson for [an organization] so he could clarify the role of his group in assassinating innocents, including a wounded police officer, and distinguish it from the assassination of other innocents in Paris in the name of another group of terrorists, is both mystifying and disgusting,” Mr. Comey said in a letter to The Times.

He added: “I fear you have lost your way and urge you to reconsider allowing your newspaper to be used by those who have murdered so many and work every day to murder more.”

Oh wait. That’s not what Comey was complaining about.

He’s complaining about this paragraph, which — in an article that also grants “American counterterrorism authorities” anonymity (with no explanation) — helps clarify the relationship between the perpetrators of the Hebdo Charlie attack.

A member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said the joint timing of the two operations was a result of the friendship between Mr. Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers, not of common planning between the Qaeda group and the Islamic State.

That is, Comey is complaining that the NYT is using the same methods — anonymous sourcing — to find more knowledgeable sources to explain the attacks that it uses to parrot official governmental sources. Only Comey and his colleagues’ claims about the attack may be laundered through anonymity under his approach. Not better positioned sources.

Which I guess means he’s happy that the NYT anonymously publishes the claims of US government officials clarifying that the civilians they kill in drone strikes are not civilians, or even clarifying whether the CIA or DOD killed a particular person. He just doesn’t want the NYT to anonymously quote other killers’ spokespersons trying to clarify what the killing is about.

emptywheel
Marcy has been blogging full time since 2007. She’s known for her live-blogging of the Scooter Libby trial, her discovery of the number of times Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, and generally for her weedy analysis of document dumps.

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including the Guardian, Salon, and the Progressive, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.

Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse and dog in Grand Rapids, MI.

7 replies
  1. bloopie2 says:

    Another asshole salesman who has risen to the “top of his profession” by being the best asshole salesman — trying to make his case, regardless of the truth or of who he fucks over. Here, playing defense by accusing the other guy of cheating. What a loser. Of course, if you call him out on it, he has no shame, no remorse. That kind of person, it never enters his mind that he is less than right – either it all just bounces off him, or he really truly doesn’t care what you think. Too bad the world is so full of them and we have to deal with them every day.

    Don’t mine me, it’s just a bad start to a Friday.

  3. ArizonaBumblebee says:

    Jim Comey is hoping that Dean Baquet will be as pliable as Jill Abramson and Bill Keller were in their relationships with federal authorities trying to influence the newspaper’s coverage of national security issues. We can always hope that the NYT will return to its glory days when it told Richard Nixon and John Mitchell to go to hell after they tried to stop the newspaper publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, but I won’t hold my breath for it to happen.

  4. GKJames says:

    And behind the scenes, he may well have threatened the NYT with a claim for “material support for terrorism.”

  5. wallace says:

    quote”Which I guess means he’s happy that the NYT anonymously publishes the claims of US government officials clarifying that the civilians they kill in drone strikes are not civilians, or even clarifying whether the CIA or DOD killed a particular person. He just doesn’t want the NYT to anonymously quote other killers’ spokespersons trying to clarify what the killing is about.”unquote

    To be clear…let us clrairify. un hunh . gottcha.

    Is there any sanity left on this planet?

  6. earlofhuntingdon says:

    No doubt, Mr. Comey would have condemned all of Wilfred Burchett’s reporting about Japan, Korea and Vietnam, even though he often named names.

Comments are closed.