Exposing NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping Program and How the WH Pressured the NYT to Kill the Story

[marmar]

from DemocracyNow!:



April 01, 2008


EXCLUSIVE…Bush’s Law: Eric Lichtblau on Exposing the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping Program and How the White House Pressured the New York Times to Kill the Story


In a national broadcast exclusive, we speak with New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau about his new book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005. He reveals the inside story of the New York Times’s decision to delay publication of the story for more than a year after intense lobbying from the White House.


Guest:

Eric Lichtblau, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his stories on the NSA’s wiretapping program in the New York Times. His new book is Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice.


AMY GOODMAN: After months of debate, Congress has yet to authorize a new domestic surveillance law amidst a standstill over immunizing telecommunications companies that aided government spying. Last month, the Democratic-led House narrowly passed a bill excluding the immunity provision, despite a threatened veto by President Bush. Bush wants the House to mimic the Senate version, which reauthorizes National Security Agency spying while shielding telecom companies from retroactive lawsuits.

The NSA launched its warrantless spy program in October 2001. But it took over four years for the program to become publicly known, finally revealed by the New York Times in December 2005. My next guest is one of the two New York Times reporters who broke the NSA story. Eric Lichtblau has just come out with a new book; it’s called Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice.

The book’s new disclosures include an account of fierce anxieties within the Bush administration on the program’s legality when it began. Eric Lichtblau also reveals the inside story of the New York Times’s own decision to delay publication of the story for more than a year after intense lobbying by the White House.

Eric Lichtblau won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize along with James Risen for breaking the NSA spy story, joining us now from Washington, his first national broadcast interview following the book’s publication.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Eric.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. You say that the war on terror that the Bush administration employed to mask the most radical remaking of American justice in generations. Explain.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Well, what we’ve seen since 9/11 is really a historic shift, as I try and lay out in the book, in the way we look at intelligence and law enforcement and the role of the federal government. You know, it’s akin to what Hoover did at the FBI in going after organized crime in the ’50s and ’60s or against Communists. It’s just a remaking of the sense of what the federal government’s purpose is. After 9/11, Bush and his top advisers—Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Cheney certainly—said this will not happen again, and they made clear that every branch of the federal government would be tasked to remake itself within the Pentagon, within the Justice Department, within the CIA, within the NSA, to ensure that every possible lead, every possible tension that could lead back to al-Qaeda would be checked, would be scrubbed before another attack could happen. Now, what was lacking in that pursuit was really the checks and balances that we’ve taken for granted in terms of constitutional principles, and that’s the story that I try and lay out in the book.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us how you stumbled on the NSA warrantless wiretapping story.


ERIC LICHTBLAU: Well, what I lay out in the book is that in the chapter that discusses the back story, if you will, the story of how the New York Times came to publish the story, was that there was an intense nervousness over this program from the very beginning, literally from the first hours and days that it began in October 2001. There were people within the government, within the FBI, within the Justice Department, who were worried that the NSA was doing something illegal. Remarkably, they kept a bottle on that for the better part of two-and-a-half years.

My partner and I—Jim Risen—simultaneously, but separately, began hearing some of these rumblings in 2004 through sources that we had. I covered mainly Justice Department issues; Jim covered mainly intelligence and CIA issues. We both began hearing things in 2004. At the time—we only learned later, it was at the time that really there was this revolt within the government that led to the near-resignations of more than twenty people within the administration over this program. What we were hearing was really the steam blowing over on this program, and that led to months of reporting that led to internal strife within the paper over whether or not to publish this paper—whether or not to publish this story. And the paper initially decided, after really agonizing internal deliberations, that because of the administration’s insistence that this could harm national security, it would not publish the story. They came back at that decision obviously more than a year later in late 2005 and ultimately did decide to publish the story. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/1/exclusivebushs_law_eric_lichtblau_on_exposing

[L. Coyote]

1. Feingold: McConnell Distorted Senate Surveillance Debate in Speech

Feingold: McConnell Distorted Senate Surveillance Debate in Speech
By Paul Kiel - April 1, 2008, 11:23AM - http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/feingold_mcconnell_distorted_s.php


As we've often noted here, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has frequently gotten into trouble for making statements that were either impolitic or, well, not true. And last week, in his zeal to demonstrate the unreasonableness of liberal critics, he made a statement that was both.

Speaking at Furman University, he said (pdf http://www.odni.gov/speeches/20080328_speech.pdf): ..............

Feingold writes in a letter to McConnell today that he ought to either back up his statement or "issue an immediate correction and an apology."

Feingold concludes:

"While all sides of this debate deserve to be heard, to falsely attribute statements to United States Senators serves only to mislead the American people. It also undermines your credibility and that of the position of Director of National Intelligence."

...........

[DemReadingDU]

2. NPR Fresh Air: In 'Bush's Law,' Secret Surveillance Efforts Revealed

4/2/08 In 'Bush's Law,' Secret Surveillance Efforts Revealed

In 2005, The New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency had initiated wiretaps and other forms of surveillance without court orders. It was a story the Bush administration hoped to keep under wraps, says Eric Lichtblau, one of the two reporters who pushed for the publication of the story.

Lichtblau's new book, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, details how the administration used the "war on terror" to push for controversial surveillance programs.

Lichtblau is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times. In 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of domestic spying.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89284024

Also included is an excerpt from his book

[L. Coyote]

3. K & R. Are ALL COMMUNICATIONS routed overseas to circumvent US law and the Constitution?

Are ALL COMMUNICATIONS routed overseas to circumvent US law and the Constitution?

ASK your Congress member what crimes they want immunity for!!

Answer: Your Congress member is not permitted to know such things. >> THIS IS TRUE < > NOT A JOKE <<

Are ALL COMMUNICATIONS routed overseas to circumvent US law and the Constitution?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3094578