Sunday, November 10, 2013

Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/public-editor/sullivan-lessons-in-a-surveillance-drama-redux.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=opinion

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 6:41 AM
Subject: re: Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>




To the Editor:



      When Bill Keller decided to quash the Lichtblau/Risen story of widespread illegal wiretapping, in one stroke he cheated the shareholders of the New York Times out of the scoop of the year (and the attendant boost in revenues) and cheated the American electorate out of the information on which we should have based our political choice in the national election.



   A fever of fear following the attacks of 9/11 can be no excuse.The very pressure that the White House brought to bear here should have screamed to any journalist that this was neither small nor trivial. As William Randolph Hearst put it "News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising".  By kow-towing to "somebody", Bill Keller degraded journalism.



Barry Haskell Levine











By 



Published: November 9, 2013 5 Comments














IT was almost eight years ago that The Times published a blockbuster story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about a secret Bush administration program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. But for many Times readers, it still resonates deeply.








Readers’ Comments








The 13-month delay in publishing the article, a period that spanned a presidential election, continues to bother these readers. Why did The Times, at the urgent request of the administration, wait so long? What does that say about the relationship between the government and the press? Would the same thing happen today? I hear about it often in email and online comments. It crops up in newspaper columns, on Twitter, in journalism reviews.



Now, in light of the huge leak of classified information on government surveillance from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, the episode has a renewed currency.



Mr. Snowden has said that, because of this very episode, he chose to take his trove elsewhere (largely to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, to the video journalist Laura Poitras and to Barton Gellman at The Washington Post). Mr. Snowden recently told the journalist Natasha Vargas-Cooper that those who put themselves in danger to leak information “must have absolute confidence that the journalists they go to will report on that information rather than bury it.”



In recent weeks, I have interviewed some of the key players in that nine-year-old drama. The episode — much written about elsewhere, in New York magazine, in The Washington Post, in a book by Mr. Lichtblau and in a new one by Peter Baker of The Times — has gone largely unexplained in the pages of The Times itself.



The public editor at that time, Byron Calame, submitted a long list of questions to Times leadership but got no answers. He later wrote about one element of the situation, establishing that the article could have appeared before the presidential election of 2004, in which George W. Bush won a second term. More recently, HBO bought the rights and had a screenplay written. Certainly, there is cinematic material here: The reporters who fought to publish; the government officials who wanted to kill the story (even arranging a last-ditch Oval Office meeting where Mr. Bush made the case to the Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.); the big-name editors weighing the decision.



Given the episode’s recent re-emergence, I thought it might be useful to examine it here, in order to give Times readers a deeper understanding of what happened and why, and to explore why it matters now and what the lessons might be.



Everyone involved sees the episode as inextricably linked with its moment in time — its proximity to 9/11 and all that followed. Some also say that a tumultuous era at The Times, after the Jayson Blair scandal and the flawed reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war, may have made editors more cautious.



“The whole confluence was pretty remarkable,” Mr. Lichtblau told me. Although he strongly believed, and still does, that the story should have run when it was first ready — the fall of 2004 — he sees the historical context as a major reason that it did not.



So does Bill Keller, then the executive editor, who — on the recommendation of the Washington bureau chief at the time, Philip Taubman — decided against running the original story.



“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune,” Mr. Keller said. “It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”



Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told me in an interview that he argued strenuously against publication, right up until the moment when The Times decided to go ahead. His rationale: “That this effort was designed to intercept threatening communication” and to prevent another terrorist attack.



In the end, The Times published the story with a couple of guns held to its head: First, the knowledge that the information in the article was also contained in a book by Mr. Risen, “State of War,” whose publication date was bearing down like a freight train. Second, at the end, the word of a possible injunction against publishing, Mr. Risen said, provided a final push: “It was like a lightning bolt.” (Mr. Hayden said that would not have happened: “Prior restraint was never in the cards.”)



Like a game of chicken played on a high wire, it remains “the most stressful and traumatic time of my life,” Mr. Risen recalls. Although The Times later said that further reporting strengthened the story enough to justify publishing it, few doubt that Mr. Risen’s book was what took an essentially dead story and revived it in late 2005. “Jim’s book was the driving force,” Mr. Lichtblau said.



There was another important factor, he said. “The Bush administration actively misled us, claiming there was never a doubt that the wiretapping operations were legal.” That turned out to be “laughably untrue.” In fact, there was an imminent revolt on this very issue within the Justice Department.



What would happen now? What if Mr. Snowden had brought his information trove to The Times? By all accounts, The Times would have published the revelations — just as it did many WikiLeaks stories.



“I think our story broke the fever,” Mr. Risen said. “We’re much better now” about pushing back against government pressure. Jill Abramson, the executive editor (then managing editor), has not only defended the Snowden-related stories as squarely in the public interest but has had Times reporters and editors collaborating with The Guardian and ProPublica on Snowden-sourced stories.











IS it ever appropriate for the press to hold back information at the government’s urging? It depends on whom you ask. Mr. Hayden would answer that one way; Mr. Greenwald quite another. (And even Mr. Hayden told me that he can’t prove any harm to national security from the publication of the eavesdropping stories — then or now.) I like Mr. Risen’s answer: “Very rarely.”
















Address: Public Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018











Readers’ Comments








Mr. Keller and Mr. Taubman say that they made the best decisions they could at the time, after a great deal of consideration. “If people knew everything, different people would reach different conclusions,” Mr. Keller said. As for whether publishing the article in the fall of 2004 would have changed history, it’s impossible to know.



“It’s become an unexamined article of faith” on the left, he said, that early publication might have given John Kerry the presidency.



One thing is certain, Mr. Keller said. The story (published in December 2005, it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006) “looks prescient,” he said, adding: “We know now that people with noble intentions can run way out of bounds. Risen and Lichtblau were on to that a long time ago.”



What’s more, the reporters were working without the cache of classified documentation that a whistle-blower might have. They based their story on the patient development of confidential sources.



Mr. Taubman remembers his fateful recommendation not to publish as “an agonizing one.” He dismisses any role played by his relationships with members of the Bush administration, including Condoleezza Rice, with whom he shares longstanding and close ties to Stanford University (where they both now teach). As national security adviser in 2004 and secretary of state in 2005, she opposed the article’s publication, he said. But “that did not affect my thinking,” which was that national security would be harmed by publication.



What if he knew then everything he knows now, in light of the Snowden revelations? “I would have made a different decision had I known that Jim and Eric were tugging on a thread that led to a whole tapestry,” Mr. Taubman said.



Given the law of unintended consequences, and a fair helping of irony, the publication of the warrantless eavesdropping story resonates now in quite another way: The furor it caused prompted the Bush administration to push hard for changes in the laws governing surveillance.



“Our story set in motion the process of making all this stuff legal,” Mr. Lichtblau said. “Now it’s all encoded in law. Bush got everything he wanted on his way out of office.”



There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s legal.



Mr. Taubman now teaches a course at Stanford — titled “Need to Know” — about the tension between government and the news media. He recently brought Mr. Hayden in as a guest speaker.



What is the major lesson, then, of the drama in which Mr. Taubman played such a crucial role?



“The old adage, which we violated, is still a good one,” he said. “Always err on the side of publishing.”




















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