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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Jonathan Alter has finally had enough
Posted by Jill | 7:10 AM

I've always had a sense that Alter is basically a good guy, but for the last five years, he's fought mightily to find something redeeming in the Bush Administration.

I think perhaps he's finally awakened and realized that there isn't anything. He's mad as hell, he's taking names and he's using the "D" word:

Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.


What's almost more disturbing about all this, and it's not getting much attention outside of Blogtopia, is the cozy relationship between the honchos at the Gray Lady and the Bush Administration. Here we have the Administration spying on whoever they damn well decide is their enemy. It's an election year. And the incumbent who's doing the spying calls in Sulzberger and Keller and asks them not to run the story -- AND THEY AGREE TO IT.

I blogged earlier this week on whether the New York Times aided and abetted the Bush Administration in gaming the election, and it sure looks like they did. Most Americans, even conservatives, are outraged by this, for all that there are still a fair number of Bush die-hards who will twist themselves into pretzels till the cows come home rather than admit that they were wrong about this guy. Would it have made a difference in the election outcome? Perhaps not; not with an opponent as inept and lame as John Kerry and the kind of election shenanigans we saw last year. But whether the paper's complicity with the Bush Administration altered (so to speak) the election's outcome is immaterial. The more troubling aspect to all this is that journalists are supposed to speak truth to power, not kowtow in the face of it so that it can get invited the the best parties and get towel-snapped by the President.
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