THIS MODERN WORLD

Conservatives should fall down on their knees every morning and thank their white patriarchal Christian god for the existence of the New York Times. The paper that helped sell the Iraq war via Judy Miller’s sterling reportage may also be the paper that helped ensure the re-election of George W. Bush — by sitting on the fact that he was busy committing impeachable offenses until a year after the election.

The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election.

But the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last Friday, when it became apparent a book by one of its reporters was about to break the news, according to journalists familiar with the paper’s internal discussions.

And then there’s this:

Dec. 19, 2005 – 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.

Keller and Sulzberger had a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office — and the Times did not bother to mention the fact.

Unsurprisingly, the live audience attending a broadcast of the Fox News “Dayside” program is quite eager to “sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety,” as Benjamin Franklin famously put it (noting that such citizens frankly deserve neither). But surprisingly, Fox’s in-house legal expert, Judge Andrew Napolitano, has strayed off the reservation:

Napolitano: When Congress enacted the FISA act in ’77, it also made it criminal for anyone in this country to use the power of the government to wiretap without a search warrant. It made it easy to get the search warrant with the FISA law, but it said you have to get the search warrant.

Host: So what the president’s done is a criminal act?

Napolitano: The president has violated the law in the name of national security, not wanting to violate the law, believing he’s doing the right thing, but he violated it nonetheless. He can’t pick and choose which laws to obey and not to obey any more than the rest of us can.

Not too far off the reservation, but definitely at least one foot outside the gate. The audience is unimpressed: But judge, they’s terrorists! They wants to blow us up! Etc., etc., ad nauseum.

….unfuckingbelievable:

Audience member: We’ve got to give the President the flexibility to protect me. I use my cell phone all the time and I don’t have any problem with the folks listening to the conversations I have because they’re appropriate conversations.

And the audience bursts into applause.

If our democracy survives the next three years in any recognizable form, it will be in spite of morons like that.

NEW BEDFORD — A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”

Story.

Apparently some people don’t understand the difference between a leak that is solely intended to hurt someone as an act of political retribution — i.e., Valerie Plame — and a leak that is intended to blow the whistle on a violation of the law. Let me try to put this simply: the first is a dangerous abuse of power. The second is an attempt to prevent a dangerous abuse of power.

There. Wasn’t that easy?

I’m glad we had this little talk.

Sorting through this one could take all day, and I’ve got deadlines. But I’ll be interested to see the fact checking on this:

We were listening to (Osama bin Laden). He was using a type of cell phone, a type of phone, and somebody put it in the newspaper, that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team, and he changed … and this is before they attacked us by the way.

Somebody with Lexis/Nexis needs to do some digging and see if there was actually a newspaper article sometime before 9/11 about the type of phone Osama bin Laden was using, or if Bush just pulled that one entirely out of his ass.

…Update via an alert reader below. The punchline: the paper was the Washington Times.

The Commission footnote (chapter 4, no. 105) refers to a front page
story in the Washington Times on August 21, 1998 entitled “Terrorist
is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel,” by Martin Sieff, and to
interviews with several intelligence community officials.

That Washington Times story stated in passing that “He [bin Ladin]
keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and
has given occasional interviews to international news organizations,
including Time magazine and CNN News.”