my guess? the times is going to regret clamoring for the plame special cousel precedent. http://news.pajamasmedia.com/politics/2005/12/30/6813051_US_Justice_Depar.shtml -- U.S. Justice Department opens probe into leak of Bush's domestic spying WASHINGTON, Dec. 30, 2005 (The Canadian Press delivered by Newstex) -- The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President George W. Bush's secret domestic spying program. The inquiry focuses on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials said. The Times revealed the existence of the program two weeks ago in a front-page story that acknowledged the news had been withheld from publication for a year, partly at the request of the administration and partly because the newspaper wanted more time to confirm various aspects of the program. White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Justice undertook the action on its own, and the president was informed of it on Friday. "The leaking of classified information is a serious issue. The fact is that al-Qaida's playbook is not printed on Page One and when America's is, it has serious ramifications," Duffy told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where Bush was spending the holidays. Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said the paper will not comment on the investigation. Revelation of the secret spying program unleashed a firestorm of criticism of the administration. Some critics accused the president of breaking the law by authorizing intercepts of conversations - without prior court approval or oversight - of people inside the United States and abroad who had suspected ties to al-Qaida or its affiliates. The surveillance program, which Bush acknowledged authorizing, bypassed a nearly 30-year-old secret court established to oversee highly sensitive investigations involving espionage and terrorism. Administration officials insisted that Bush has the power to conduct the warrantless surveillance under the Constitution's war powers provision. They also argued that Congress gave Bush the power to conduct such a secret program when it authorized the use of military force against terrorism in a resolution adopted within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Justice Department's investigation was being initiated after the agency received a request for the probe from the NSA. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been conducting a separate leak investigation to determine who in the administration leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the media in 2003. Several reporters have been called to testify before a grand jury or to give depositions. New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail, refusing to reveal her source, before testifying in the probe. The administration's legal interpretation of the president's powers allowed the government to avoid requirements under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in conducting the warrantless surveillance. The act established procedures that an 11-member court used in 2004 to oversee nearly 1,800 government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage. Congressional leaders have said they were not briefed four years ago, when the secret program began, as thoroughly as the administration has since contended. Former senate majority leader Tom Daschle said in an article printed last week on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that Congress explicitly denied a White House request for war-making authority in the United States. "This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas ... but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens," Daschle wrote. Daschle was Senate Democratic leader at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. The administration formally defended its domestic spying program in a letter to Congress last week, saying the country's security outweighs privacy concerns of individuals who are monitored. In a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Justice Department said Bush authorized conducting electronic surveillance without first obtaining a warrant in an effort to thwart terrorist acts against the United States. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella acknowledged "legitimate" privacy interests. But he said those interests "must be balanced" against national security
Excellent! I hope they find out who the leaker is. They should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
if only the democratic party could be this serious. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ed...rticles/2005/12/30/the_case_for_surveillance/ -- CHARLES FRIED The case for surveillance By Charles Fried | December 30, 2005 PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH has acknowledged that he authorized surveillance of electronic communications between people in the United States and people beyond our borders without asking for court authorization. The president claims that congressional authorization for military action against Al Qaeda, together with his inherent constitutional powers, make such action lawful. There is some plausibility to that claim but until tested in the courts it is impossible to give a definitive opinion about it. I am convinced of the urgent necessity of such a surveillance program. I suppose but do not know -- the revelations have been understandably and deliberately vague -- that included in what is done is a constant computerized scan of all international electronic communications. (The picture of a G-Man in the basement of an apartment house tapping into a circuit board is certainly inapposite.) Programmed into this computerized scan are likely to be automatic prompts that are triggered by messages containing certain keywords, go to certain addresses, occur in certain patterns or after specific events. Supposedly those messages that trigger these prompts are targeted for further scrutiny. In the context of the post-9/11 threat, which includes sleeper cells and sleeper operatives in the United States, no other form of surveillance is likely to be feasible and effective. But this kind of surveillance may not fit into the forms for court orders because their function is to identify targets, not to conduct surveillance of targets already identified. Even retroactive authorization may be too cumbersome and in any event would not reach the initial broad scan that narrows the universe for further scrutiny. Moreover, it is likely that at the first, broadest stages of the scan no human being is involved -- only computers. Finally, it is also possible that the disclosure of any details about the search and scan strategies and the algorithms used to sift through them would immediately allow countermeasures by our enemies to evade or defeat them. If such impersonal surveillance on the orders of the president for genuine national security purposes without court or other explicit authorization does violate some constitutional norm, then we are faced with a genuine dilemma and not an occasion for finger-pointing and political posturing. If the situation is as I hypothesize and leads to important information that saves lives and property, would any reasonable citizen want it stopped? But if it violates the Constitution can we accept the proposition that such violations must be tolerated? We should ask ourselves what concrete harm is done by such a program. Is a person's privacy truly violated if his international communications are subject to this kind of impersonal, computerizerd screening? If it is not, at what stage of further focus do real, rather than abstract and hysterical concerns arise? And to what extent is the hew and cry about this program a symptom of a generalized distrust of all government, or of just this administration? If of all government, then we are in a state of mind that renders us incapable of defending ourselves from real threats. If of this administration, then can we afford to disarm the only government we have until the result of the next election, which is likely to be as partisan and closely divided as the last? The resolution of this dilemma to allow both the use of an important tool of national security and respect for the rule of law needs ingenuity, discretion, and a good faith search for sensible solutions. So far I have heard only alarmist and hyperbolic pronouncements calculated neither to illuminate nor resolve this problem. Charles Fried teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School. He served as solicitor general in the second Reagan administration and as a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
Nope! Whoever this true patriot is they should be commended and thanked for their service to America. So basso should Gonzales recuse himself from the investigation and appoint a special prosecutor? After all he was White House council at the time that signed off on the NSA spying and is even now defending the president's actions.
when people break the law they should be exposed. the "leaker" is a true patriot and they did nothing wrong in exposing these illegal activities. valerie plame was a covert cia operative who worked on nuclear counter-proliferation. outing her was illegal and compromised american security. wiretapping without a court order is illegal and compromises american values. "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution." - george w. bush - liar bush was doing wiretaps w/out court orders at the very time he made this statement. he lied directly to the american people and there is no defense for it.
whistleblowing on illegal government activities = settling political scores by divulging the NOC list. basso's universe!
I really hope this story brings down the New York Times. It certainly has the chance to do just that! The NYT has done quite a bit to advance al Qaeda's cause by attempting to subvert the War on Terror.
While the Bush Administration and most of the country are busy fighting the War on Terror, the NYTimes is bust fighting a War on America. Shameful, really.
in the plame case the outting was the problem. the illegality etc. her being a CIA agent wasn't an illegal activity. it was her being outted especially for political reasons. in this case the illegal activity is not the leak but the spying on americans in direct violation of FISA. and the excuse of secrecy obviously doesn't fly given that FISA courts are secret. nor does the expediency given that FISA allows you to spy for 72 hours and go to a court after that.
Hey! Don't blame me because you have no honor in your soul and would sell out your civil rights and personal freedoms to this assclown of a president. It's freaks like you that are the real traitors to our great country. If the little frat boy president was truely interested in this leak and finding out who did it, they would have begun the investigation when the NYTs came to them a year ago with the story instead of begging them not to release it. Why do you think that is gwaynie? Why do you think the WH begged the Times not to print the story. I'll answer for you... I expect that the Bush lackeys have been busy for the last twelve months: Tapping phones, Reading e-mails, Kidnapping people, Torturing suspects in secret prisons, Killing anyone who may be a threat, And other such things. In other words, business as Usual!
The NYT is critical of some of Bush's policies. Therefore NYT "not wit us." "Wit us or aginst us." NYT = enemy in "War on Terror = terrorist = Al Qaeda. It is all so simple in the mind of Bush and his dittoheads.
If all Americans were Bin Ladenists like you, the country wouldn't be worth defending. You have fewer redeeming values than the bubonic plague..
I too would like to know why the White House begged the Times to kill the story before the election and why the Times acquiesced. ------------------------ Internal scuffle at the Times as editor, publisher refuse questions on withholding NSA story An internal faceoff at the New York Times is set to go public in Sunday editions when the public editor accuses his bosses of 'stonewalling' him in his attempts to understand the decision to report on NSA eavesdropping after at least a year's delay, RAW STORY has learned. In his bi-weekly column slated for Sunday's edition, Byron Calame says the paper's response has been "woefully inadequate" and reveals that he e-mailed a list of 28 questions to the executive editor and publisher who declined to answer, the first time that's happened since he became the paper's ombudsman. Executive editor Bill Keller's only response was one line: "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." To Calame, the "most obvious and troublesome omission" is the failure to adequately address whether the story was ready to publish before the Nov. 2, 2004 election. The few public explanations given by Keller haven't been clear about the exact timing and leaves the public editor with "uncomfortable doubts." http://rawstory.com/news/2005/New_York_Times_public_editor_says_1231.html Excerpts from Calame's column: # 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, Sulzberger and 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... "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 full Times article... http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01publiceditor.html
Basso do you honestly believe that having a free press that is crtical of the government amounts to waging a war on the country?
