Woman of mass destruction II?

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts

New York Times: Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

It's an absolutely astonishing article, and it's already showing once again the impact of an unfettered Times. As the Washington Post noted in its article on the Senate's rebuke to Bush on the Patriot Act,

In today's Senate debate, several lawmakers cited a New York Times report disclosing that Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying.

The vote was essentially 53-46 to cut off debate; Republicans needed just 7 mores votes to prevail, how many of these were swayed by the Times piece to not change their vote?

But a few paragraphs in the article is this disclosure:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

A year! The article is about twice the length of normal Times pieces, and obviously touches upon a sensitive subject. But the Times should disclose how much of it was established by the year's worth of extra reporting--a time period during which perhaps thousands of Americans were spyed upon via quite possibly illegal means.

This was not coincidentally a time period during which the Times was preoccupied with its own Judy Miller. As the New Yorker's media critic Ken Auletta noted in an online interview and a lengthy profile of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Judy's self-inflicted saga colored everything in the newsroom, and was close to the heart and constantly on the mind of the publisher.

Was the Times constrained by its concern for Miller? Was it not as aggressive pursuing a sensitive investigation of the administration at a time when one of its reporters was languishing in jail, a confinement that was directly tied to the paper's relationship with the administration? Were people at the Times a little gunshy over Judy's high-profile investigative screw-up?

Because it doesn't seem like taking a year to do 'additional reporting' matches the urgency of the subject matter. This was--and is--an ongoing rank violation of all that this country holds dear. The Times obviously needed to get it right; but I'd rather have a shorter article as soon as possible that gets this out in the open, than something that's been getting worked over for a year. Journalists need to be responsible, but I trust the Times reporters who had an article ready to go a year ago.

Maybe, like Bill Clinton being held hostage in his second term by Monica Lewinsky, internal Times management was hobbled by Judy Miller for the past year--the Auletta piece certainly shows she took up an inordinate amount of the time and energy of the paper's top brass.

If her situation even partially contributed to a delay in publishing this article, it's not just the Times that's suffered from Miss Run Amok, it's possibly thousands of Americans.

Maybe we can get Maureen Dowd to do some digging.

Postscript: President Bush said at a news conference on Monday: "It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is discussing the enemy."

Is he kidding?