UPDATED: Some of the news that's fit to print

Update at bottom...

Webmedia guru Dan Gillmor believes the New York Times has some 'splaining to do for having withheld the information that our government was eavesdropping on American citizens. He's not alone.

The Times' editor Bill Keller released this explanation (emphasis mine):

"the administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security. Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed. ... As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that time."

Here they are on why they've suddenly decided to publish..."the paper found that civil liberties issues 'loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood,' and the paper found it could report on the secret program without damaging 'any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record.'"

Am I alone in interpreting this to mean that they didn't really bother to check on the "variety of legal checks" or the meat of the "convincing national security argument"? Again, we don't know because they've been less than forthcoming.

Gillmor writes: "It's truly baffling that the paper held this for so long. No doubt the Times was under the fiercest kind of pressure from the White House -- the kind that the rest of us can scarcely imagine, no doubt."

***

Well, now it turns out, as reported by Jonathan Alter, that the Times' Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., editor and publisher respectively, were called into the principal's (Oval) office on December 6 to have a difficult-to-refuse offer made by the Administration before publishing their report:

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.

(Bayosphere, Newsweek)

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