Times Reporter Shares Part of NSA Spying Back Story

On December 16 2005, the New York Times revealed the existence of the President's secret, warrantless wiretapping program, setting in motion an ongoing stream of revelations about more secret domestic surveillance and acrimonious political debates over whether to give amnesty to corporations that aided the program.

New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau broke the story of the NSA's domestic spying in December 2005.
Photo: GoGoGadgetScott/Flickr But lost in the aftermath is the fact that Pulitzer-prize winning story came out more than a year after the Times learned of the program and informed the government it was thinking of exposing it.

Now, Eric Lichtblau – who co-wrote the story with James Risen – is telling some of the back story in a book, casting it as the tale of a journalist learning to distrust the government. There's secret meetings at the White House, a buried story brought back to life by Risen's decision to include it in his book, and the online publishing of the story in response to a rumored threat that the government might try to stop the story with a court order.

But Lichtblau can't actually bring himself to talk about how it is the New York Times allowed the administration to scare it into spiking the story, a decision that wasn't reversed until reporter James Risen decided on his own to include it in a book he was writing.

In an excerpt in Slate Wednesday, Lichtblau writes that:

We still had to persuade the editors that the reasons to run the story clearly outweighed the reasons to keep it secret. We went back to old sources and tried new ones. Our reporting brought into sharper focus what had already started to become clear a year earlier: The concerns about the program—in both its legal underpinnings and its operations—reached the highest levels of the Bush administration. There were deep concerns within the administration that the president had authorized what amounted to an illegal usurpation of power. The image of a united front we'd been presented a year earlier in meetings with the administration—with unflinching support for the program and its legality—was largely a façade. The administration, it seemed clear to me, had lied to us. And we were coming closer to understanding the cracks. By the time we met with White House officials in December 2005, Keller had all but made up his mind: The legal concerns about the program were too great to justify keeping it out of public view. The only real question now was not whether the story would run, but when.

The tale is an odd one. There seems to have been at least two meetings between the Times and the White House about the story, but Lichtblau's Slate excerpt confusingly jumps between the two.

He also doesn't explain who at the Times was persuaded in 2004, at the tail end of a presidential election, to withhold a bombshell story about the president secretly wiretapping inside the United States in plain contravention of federal law.

His book, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, comes out Tuesday, April 1.

Here's hoping that the book explains much more about the 13-month hold on one of the most important stories of the post-9/11 era, instead of skimming over embarrassing details and relying on passive constructions ("It was a difficult decision for everyone.").

The sentence "The editors were not persuaded we had enough for a story" is not enlightening nor does it ring true. Nor does it explain at all how the nation's most respected newspaper nearly spiked, for eternity, the warrantless wiretapping program story.

Why should the debate at the Times over the NSA's warrantless targeting of Americans be more of a secret than the spying?

See Also:

• Report: NSA's Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned 'Total Information Awareness' Project
• Phone and Email Data-Mining Used in War on Drugs, Too
• Former Justice Insider, an Unlikely Civil Lib Hero, Details ...
• Rogue FBI Letters Hint at Phone Companies' Own Data Mining Program
• Pentagon And CIA Involved In Domestic Spying
• Total Information Awareness Lives On