Dear Gov. Dean - Even Ashcroft said “No”; So, why did the NYTimes hide it?

understandinglife

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Mon Jan-02-06 10:30 PM
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Dear Gov. Dean - Even Ashcroft said “No”; So, why did the NYTimes hide it?

2 January 2005 (# 28)

We learn from Newsweek that John Ashcroft refused to allow Andy Card and Alberto “Abu” Gonzales to continue their illegal spying on American citizens:

At the Justice Department, it was a former prosecutor, James Comey, who forced the White House to back away from the so-called Torture Memo, which appeared to give intelligence agencies a license to use any interrogation method that did not cause the extreme pain associated with organ failure. Comey was the No. 2 man at the department at the time. Although the details are unclear, it appears that Comey's objections were also key to slowing the warrantless-eavesdropping program in 2004 for a time. According to several officials who would not be identified talking about still-classified matters, Comey (among other government lawyers) argued that the authority for the program — the 2001 "use of force" resolution — had grown stale. It was time to audit the program before proceeding in any case, Comey said.

But in March 2004, White House chief of staff Card and White House Counsel Gonzales visited Ashcroft, the seriously ill attorney general, to try to get him to overrule Comey, who was officially acting as A.G. while Ashcroft was incapacitated. Ashcroft refused, and a battle over what to do broke out in the Justice Department and at the White House. Finally, sometime in the summer of 2004, a compromise was reached, with Comey onboard: according to an account in The New York Times, Justice and the NSA refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether "probable cause" existed to start monitoring someone's conversations.

Bureaucrats frustrated by their political bosses have one time-honored weapon: the leak.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10663996/site/newsweek/page/4

We have several reasons to be grateful to Mr. Comey, none more so than his appointment of Mr. Patrick Fitzgerald to pursue the traitor(s) who leaked the identity of Mrs. Valerie Plame Wilson and, thereby, destroyed aspects of our Nation’s national security infrastructure. Now, we can add to our list of reasons for being grateful the role Mr. Comey contributed to thwarting Alberto “torture boy” Gonzales and other Bush neoconsters from commiting even more violations of national and international law – torture, extraordinary rendition, and spying on American citizens.

What is fascinating is that we now learn that even Ashcroft had had enough of it. Timing is everything, and perhaps Ashcroft, lying ill in the hospital, had time to reflect on just what might happen to him if a Democratic candidate happened to be elected President on November 2, 2004.

The timing of the leak, and the amount of time James Risen would have required to convert the leak into an article that should have appeared before the election of November 2, 2004, might well have had more than a little impact on the behavior of Ashcroft and others during the interval March to November, 2004.

Interestingly, the “Public Editor” of the New York Times, Byron Calame, is both troubled by these timing issues and not at all satisfied with the non-responses he’s been receiving from Sulzberger and Keller:

THE New York Times' explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush's secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.

I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01publiceditor.html

I agree with Mr. Calame that it is important that the New York Times did finally publish the article. I also agree that had the Times received the original leak after the November, 2004, election one would have expected them to make that absolutely clear – they haven’t.

Suffice, then, that an assumption that Mr. Risen was working on the story well-before November 2, 2004, is likely accurate, we might be justified in thinking that the Times’ editors and publisher hoped Mr. Risen’s story would be forever forgotten. That didn’t happen and sometime in the Fall of 2005, the Times clearly had to contend with the reality of being scooped by one of its own – Mr. Risen.

Interestingly, as Mr. Calame notes, the publication of James Risen’s "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" has been advanced to tomorrow, January 3, 2006, from its original scheduled release of mid-January, 2006.

I’m sure you will be as eager as I to read Mr. Risen’s book. However, the purpose of this letter is not merely to alert you to its early release, but to suggest that in your discussions with various Democratic Party candidates that you stress to them the importance of calling Ashcroft, Comey, Gonzales, and Card to testify, under oath, about their interactions regarding the FISA violations that they all were aware the administration had been participating, and why, in the Spring and Summer of 2004, folk within the DoJ began to apply the brakes.

And, without revealing whom his source is, Mr. Risen must be compelled to testify exactly when he received the leak(s) and why he was prohibited from publishing his story.

Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller need to be compelled to answer why it is that they suddenly stopped heeding the demands of the White House to squash a story that probably had a better opportunity of protecting our National Security from enemies within America to sooner it became public.

Thank you for your continued leadership,

p.s. Gov. Dean, I am writing to you, as I’ve indicated in earlier letters, because you are a leader and you are also Chair of the DNC. The various issues addressed in these letters are meant to indicate to you the impressions and suggestions of a citizen in the hope that such input may be of help to you as you pursue saving the America from further neoconster ("Republican") hegemony and the lawless imperialism of the Bush oligarchy.

Peace.