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Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence
By BYRON CALAME
01/01/06 "New
York Times" -- -- THE New York Times's 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.
Despite this stonewalling, my objectives today are to assess the
flawed handling of the original explanation of the article's path
into print, and to offer a few thoughts on some factors that could
have affected the timing of the article. My intention is to do so
with special care, because my 40-plus years of newspapering leave me
keenly aware that some of the toughest calls an editor can face are
involved here - those related to intelligence gathering,
election-time investigative articles and protection of sources. On
these matters, reasonable disagreements can abound inside the
newsroom.
(A word about my reporting for this column: With the top Times
people involved in the final decisions refusing to talk and urging
everyone else to remain silent, it seemed clear to me that chasing
various editors and reporters probably would yield mostly anonymous
comments that the ultimate decision-makers would not confirm or
deny. So I decided not to pursue those who were not involved in the
final decision to publish the article - or to refer to Times
insiders quoted anonymously in others' reporting.)
At the outset, it's essential to acknowledge the far-reaching
importance of the eavesdropping article's content to Times readers
and to the rest of the nation. Whatever its path to publication, Mr.
Sulzberger and Mr. Keller deserve credit for its eventual appearance
in the face of strong White House pressure to kill it. And the basic
accuracy of the account of the eavesdropping stands unchallenged - a
testament to the talent in the trenches.
But the explanation of the timing and editing of the front-page
article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau caused major concern for
scores of Times readers. The terse one-paragraph explanation noted
that the White House had asked for the article to be killed. "After
meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns,
the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional
reporting," it said. "Some information that administration officials
argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted."
If Times editors hoped the brief mention of the one-year delay and
the omitted sensitive information would assure readers that great
caution had been exercised in publishing the article, I think they
miscalculated. The mention of a one-year delay, almost in passing,
cried out for a fuller explanation. And the gaps left by the
explanation hardly matched the paper's recent bold commitments to
readers to explain how news decisions are made.
At the very least, The Times should have told readers in the article
why it could not address specific issues. At least some realization
of this kicked in rather quickly after publication. When queried by
reporters for other news media on Dec. 16, Mr. Keller offered two
prepared statements that shed some additional light on the timing
and handling of the article.
The longer of Mr. Keller's two prepared statements said the paper
initially held the story based on national security considerations
and assurances that everyone in government believed the expanded
eavesdropping was legal. But when further reporting showed that
legal questions loomed larger than The Times first thought and that
a story could be written without certain genuinely sensitive
technical details, he said, the paper decided to publish. (Mr.
Keller's two prepared statements, as well as some thoughtful reader
comments, are posted on the Public Editor's Web Journal.)
Times readers would have benefited if the explanation in the
original article had simply been expanded to include the points Mr.
Keller made after publication. And if the length of that proved too
clunky for inclusion in the article, the explanation could have been
published as a separate article near the main one. Even the sentence
he provided me as to why he would not answer my questions offered
some possible insight.
Protection of sources is the most plausible reason I've been able to
identify for The Times's woeful explanation in the article and for
the silence of Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Keller. I base this on Mr.
Keller's response to me: "There is really no way to have a full
discussion of the back story without talking about when and how we
knew what we knew, and we can't do that."
Taken at face value, Mr. Keller seems to be contending that the
sourcing for the eavesdropping article is so intertwined with the
decisions about when and what to publish that a full explanation
could risk revealing the sources. I have no trouble accepting the
importance of confidential sourcing concerns here. The reporters'
nearly one dozen confidential sources enabled them to produce a
powerful article that I think served the public interest.
With confidential sourcing under attack and the reporters digging in
the backyards of both intelligence and politics, The Times needs to
guard the sources for the eavesdropping article with extra special
care. Telling readers the time that the reporters got one specific
fact, for instance, could turn out to be a dangling thread of
information that the White House or the Justice Department could tug
at until it leads them to the source. Indeed, word came Friday that
the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the
disclosure of classified information about the eavesdropping.
The most obvious and troublesome omission in the explanation was the
failure to address whether The Times knew about the eavesdropping
operation before the Nov. 2, 2004, presidential election. That point
was hard to ignore when the explanation in the article referred
rather vaguely to having "delayed publication for a year." To me,
this language means the article was fully confirmed and ready to
publish a year ago - after perhaps weeks of reporting on the initial
tip - and then was delayed.
Mr. Keller dealt directly with the timing of the initial tip in his
later statements. The eavesdropping information "first became known
to Times reporters" a year ago, he said. These two different
descriptions of the article's status in the general vicinity of
Election Day last year leave me puzzled.
For me, however, the most obvious question is still this: If no one
at The Times was aware of the eavesdropping prior to the election,
why wouldn't the paper have been eager to make that clear to readers
in the original explanation and avoid that politically charged
issue? The paper's silence leaves me with uncomfortable doubts.
On the larger question of why the eavesdropping article finally
appeared when it did, a couple of possibilities intrigue me.
One is that Times editors said they discovered there was more
concern inside the government about the eavesdropping than they had
initially been told. Mr. Keller's prepared statements said that "a
year ago," officials "assured senior editors of The Times that a
variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone
involved that the program raised no legal questions." So the paper
"agreed not to publish at that time" and continued reporting.
But in the months that followed, Mr. Keller said, "we developed a
fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had been
expressed during the life of the program" and "it became clear those
questions loomed larger within the government than we had previously
understood."
The impact of a new book about intelligence by Mr. Risen on the
timing of the article is difficult to gauge. The book, "State of
War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," was
not mentioned in the Dec. 16 article. Mr. Keller asserted in the
shorter of his two statements that the article wasn't timed to the
forthcoming book, and that "its origins and publication are
completely independent of Jim's book."
The publication of Mr. Risen's book, with its discussion of the
eavesdropping operation, was scheduled for mid-January - but has now
been moved up to Tuesday. Despite Mr. Keller's distancing of The
Times from "State of War," Mr. Risen's publisher told me on Dec. 21
that the paper's Washington bureau chief had talked to her twice in
the previous 30 days about the book.
So it seems to me the paper was quite aware that it faced the
possibility of being scooped by its own reporter's book in about
four weeks. But the key question remains: To what extent did the
book cause top editors to shrug off the concerns that had kept them
from publishing the eavesdropping article for months?
A final note: If Mr. Risen's book or anything else of substance
should open any cracks in the stone wall surrounding the handling of
the eavesdropping article, I will have my list of 28 questions (35
now, actually) ready to e-mail again to Mr. Keller.
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His
opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least
twice monthly in this section.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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