|
|
home / subscribe / donate / tower / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events
|
BUSH'S MELTDOWN AND THE US DEFEAT IN IRAQ He's on the floor, but can the Democrats Save Him? They're sure trying. Scorching reports on the "new jobs" myth and the end of America's housing bubble. Savage dissection of Council on Foreign Relation's Plan to "Contain" AIDS and Throw Money at the Drug Companies. Why the Military-Industrial Complex Wants U.S. Out of Iraq. What the US Press Missed about the War. Get the facts you're looking for in the subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
|
December 17 / 18, 2005 Cockburn /
St. Clair Gabriel Kolko Susan Alcorn Ralph Nader Patrick Cockburn Fred Gardner Ned Sublette Jason Leopold Laura Carlsen Jeff White William Loren Katz Rose Miriam Elizalde Greg Moses
December 16, 2005 Tom Kerr Mark Engler John Bomar Patrick Cockburn Pierre Tristam William S. Lind Cyril Neville Robert Jensen Saul Landau Website
December 15, 2005 Oren Ben-Dor Stan Cox Joshua Frank Ben Terrall Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Walter A. Davis Vijay Prashad Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Paul Craig
Roberts Lawrence R. Velvel Wayne Garcia John Sugg Gary Leupp Ray McGovern Alan Maass April Hurley, MD Kevin Alexander
Gray
December 13, 2005 Stephen T.
Banko, III Patrick Cockburn Laura Carlsen Karl Grossman Niranjan Ramakrishnan Kevin Zeese Norman Solomon Michael G.
Smith Stew Albert Bob Dylan Phil Gasper Website of
the Day
December 12, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Lawrence R.
Velvel Jessica Stewart George Bisharat Nate Mezmer Earl Ofari
Hutchinson Alison Weir Seth Sandronsky Patrick Cockburn Website of
the Day
Alexander Cockburn Landau / Hassen Ralph Nader Linn Washington, Jr Bill Christison Mike Ferner Elizabeth Schulte Neve Gordon / Yigal Bronner Linda S. Heard Ingmar Lee Ray McGovern John Chuckman John Ryan Dick J. Reavis Christopher
Brauchli Behzad Yaghmaian Aseem Shrivastava John Ross Ben Tripp St. Clair / Pollack / Vest
/ Despair Poets' Basement Website of the Week
December 9, 2005 Linn Washington,
Jr. Dave Zirin
/ Mike Stark Patrick Cockburn Alexander Cockburn Lila Rajiva Gary Leupp Jason Leopold Bruce K. Gagnon Andrew Cockburn Website of the Day
December 8, 2005 Kathy Kelly James Petras William S.
Lind Laura Carlsen Justin Akers Thomas Graham, Jr Norman Solomon Tariq Ali /
Robin Blackburn Website of
the Day
December 7, 2005 John Ryan Gary Leupp Fran Quigley Jeremy Brecher
/ Brendan Smith Joshua Frank William W.
Morgan Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Harold Pinter Website of
the Day
December 6, 2005 Ron Jacobs Patrick Cockburn Yifat Susskind Mike Whitney Pat Williams Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
the Day
December 5, 2005 John Walsh Brian Cloughley Mokhiber /
Weissman Robert Jensen Norman Solomon Peter Rost, MD Lila Rajiva Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn Lawrence R.
Velvel Rev. William Alberts Saul Landau Ralph Nader Paul Craig
Roberts Mike Whitney Allan Lichtman Dave Lindorff Brian Concannon,
Jr. Fred Gardner Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Carol Wolman St. Clair /
Vest / Walker / Pollack Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
December 2, 2005 Stan Goff Mike Ferner Christopher Brauchli Niranjan Ramakrishnan Manuel Talens Peter Phillips J.L. Chestnut,
Jr. Website of
the Day
December 1, 2005 John Walsh,
MD Ron Jacobs Jenna Orkin Joshua Frank Tiffany Ten
Eyck Missy Comley Beattie Eli Stephens Elaine Cassel Website of
the Day
November 30, 2005 Allen / D'Amato Mike Whitney Kevin Zeese Norman Solomon Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff Stephen Soldz
November 29, 2005 Phil Gasper Behzad Yaghmaian Joshua Frank Walter A. Davis Gary Leupp Len Colodny Jeffrey St.
Clair Bill Quigley Website of
the Day
November 28, 2005 Chris Reed David Isenberg Ron Jacobs Norman Solomon Justin E.H. Smith Mickey Z. Mike Whitney David Swanson Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
the Day
November 26 / 27, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Ralph Nader Brian Cloughley John Ross Gary Leupp Fred Gardner Christopher Brauchli Dave Lindorff P. Sainath Timothy J.
Freeman Lila Rajiva Eric Ruder Seth Sandronsky Joaquin Bustelo Lewis Alper Will Youmans Phyllis Pollack St. Clair /
Vest Barbara LaMorticella Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
November 25, 2005 David Price Brian McKenna Jeff Halper Ray McGovern Leigh Saavedra Ingmar Lee Website of the Day
November 24, 2005 James Petras Bob Shirley Mike Fox Niranjan Ramakrishnan Greg Moses Alexander Cockburn
November 23, 2005 Ramzy Baroud Mike Whitney Stan Cox Linda S. Heard November 22, 2005 Kevin Gray
/ Mike Hersh Ralph Nader Michael Donnelly Mike Ferner Pierre Tristam Marshall Auerback Website of
the Day
November 21, 2005 Mike Marqusee Josh Frank Mike Whitney Norman Solomon Russ Baker Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts
November 19 / 20, 2005 Fred Gardner Rep. Cynthia McKinney Ron Jacobs David Vest J.L. Chestnut,
Jr. John R. Bomar John Ross Phillip Cryan Dave Lindorff Dick J. Reavis Jeremy Scahill Dan Wright John Stanton St. Clair / Vest / Walker Phyllis Pollack Dr. Susan Block Poets Basement
November 18, 2005 Michael Neumann Dave Lindorff Michael Donnelly Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer Don Monkerud Tom Kerr Trish Schuh
November 17, 2005 John Walsh Rep. John Murtha Brian J. Foley CounterPunch
News Service Dave Lindorff Mark T. Harris Cockburn /
St. Clair
November 16, 2005 John F. Sugg Noam Chomsky Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Sam Husseini Pierre Tristam Greg Bates Farrah Hassen Bill Christison Website of
the Day
November 15, 2005 Todd Chretien Leah Caldwell Frederick Hudson Harry Browne Jason Leopold Ingmar Lee Diana Barahona Tom Andre Website of the Weekend
November 14, 2005 Diana Johnstone Paul Craig Roberts Conn Hallinan Joshua Frank Christopher
Reed
November 11 / 13, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gwyneth Leech Elmas Mallo Michael Neumann Saul Landau Sam Husseini Brian Cloughley Ron Jacobs Lila Rajiva Michael Donnelly Joe Allen Roland Sheppard Justin E.H.
Smith Ben Tripp St. Clair /
Vest Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
November 10, 2005 Peterside,
Ogon, Watts and Zalik Pat Williams Steve Higgs Jimmy Massey Lucson Pierre-Charles Anthony Newkirk Lawrence R.
Velvel Website of the Day November 9, 2005 Gary Leupp Tariq Ali Chris Floyd Elaine Cassel Joshua Frank Alison Weir Diana Johnstone
Paul Craig
Roberts Roger Burbach Ron Jacobs Ralph Nader Jim McGrath David Bloom Stan Goff
Subscribe Online
|
December 17, 2005 The New York Times and the NSA's Illegal Spying OperationTime-Delayed JournalismBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Lowe's magnificent editorial was written in response to the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen it "must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen". It's a long, sad decline from what Lowe wrote in 1851 to the disclosure by the New York Times on Friday that it sat for over a year on a story revealing that the Bush administration had sanctioned a program of secret, illegal spying on US citizens here in the Homeland, by the National Security Agency. And when it comes to zeal in protecting the Bill of Rights, between December 22, 1974 and December 16, 2005 it's been a steady run down hill for the New York Times. Thirty-one years ago, almost to the day, here's how Seymour Hersh's lead, on the front page of the NYT, began:
And here's the lead paragraph of the NYT's page one story this Friday by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau:
Government illegality is the sinew of Hersh's first sentence. He says that that what the CIA did was illegal and that it violated the CIA's charter. What the NSA has been doing is also illegal. Its warrantless domestic eavesdropping is in direct violation of the 1978 law which came about as a direct result of Hersh's expose and the congressional hearings that followed. The eavesdropping it also violates the NSA's charter, which gives the Agency no mandate to conduct domestic surveillance. Yet in Friday's story it wasn't until the end of the third paragraph that Risen and Lichtblau wrote timidly that "Some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches." In the eighth paragraph of Risen and Lichtblau's story comes the shameful disclosure alluded to above:
Hersh put the word "massive" in his first sentence, and drew undeserved fire for exaggerating the extent of surveillance, which a presidential panel finally admitted was "considerable large-scale substantial". Risen and Lichtblau shirk any direct estimate of how big the NSA's domestic spying has been, though one can deduce from the ninth paragraph of the story that probably many thousands of people had their phone conversations, and emails and faxes illegally spied upon by the NSA. The Times suggests that it held up the story for a year partly to do "additional reporting". This "additional reporting" seems to have yielded sparse results. Friday's story was extremely long, but pretty thin, once the basic fact of NSA eavesdropping had been presented. The year's work doesn't seem taken the reporters beyond what was urgently leaked to them in 2004 by twelve different government officials concerned about the illegality of what the NSA was doing and the lack of congressional oversight. Indeed, Friday's Washington Post had a much more compact story by Dan Eggan that not only stressed the illegality in its first paragraph but had material that Risen and Lichtblau missed, namely that the NSA had begun its illegal program right after 9/11, even before Bush signed the executive order okaying the surveillance, some time in 2002. It was Eggan who reported that faxes had also been spied upon by the NSA. And again, it was Eggan in the Post who put the NSA story in a larger context, namely the fact that in the past week the Pentagon has been forced to admit that military intelligence agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency have also been illegally surveilling US citizens within the US. In the TALON Program (Threat and Local Observation Notice) a Pentagon unit called Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CEFA) has been amassing thousands of files on potential threats to US military installations. Many of the subjects of these files have turned out to be antiwar groups and anti-recruiting activists. For example, when CIA director George Tenet visited as campus and encountered protests, the CEFA unit would immediately open files on the protesters. The unit was supposed to purge its files of all names and organizations caught in its drift nets that failed to meet the test of being any form of threat. But of course no such purge took place. Eggan also reported that "Teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel stationed in major US cities [have been] conducting the type of surveillance typically performed by the FBI: monitoring the movements and activities -- through high tech equipment of individuals and vehicles." The impression one gets from the Washington Post story is that the Bush administration had given the green light to a truly massive program of warrantless domestic surveillance by the NSA and military agencies. The New York Times reporters suggested no such context, setting the spying activities in a more forgiving light, as part of the war on terror. Whi designed this policy? Deep in the Times story hardy readers trudging through Risen and Lichtblau's leaden prose would have tripped over vice president Cheney's name in the twenty-fifth paragraph where he is described as bringing congressional leaders to his office to brief them on the program. Only at the very end of the story, in the forty-eighth paragraph do such readers as have survived the trek learn that the legal brief justifying this onslaught on the US Constitution was written by Professor John Yoo, at that time at the Department of Justice. Such readers would not have learned -- as they did from the Washington Post -- that Yoo had written the notorious memos justifying torture. The Times didn't make it clear that Cheney and Yoo were key players in the Administration's insistence that the Executive Branch has the inherent powers to sanction domestic spying without oversight from either of the other two branches of the government. In fact members of Congress, aside from Senator Jay Rockefeller, raised no demur. It was the judiciary, in the form of the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding over the secret intelligence court established by FISA, who reprimanded Justice Department lawyers for trying to get legal warrants from her, using as "probable cause" data from the illegal surveillance, although not admitting this. In fact it's something of a puzzle why the Times finally did publish the story, after sitting the information leaked to it by the NSA officials worried that they might get prosecuted for illegal surveillance. It is true that Friday's publication came in the closing hours of the battle in the US Senate over reauthorization of the Patriot Act. And its probably true that the publication of the story pushed enough wavering senators into the ranks of those who on Friday successfully fought to get the bill shelved, in a major defeat for the White House. It's also true that all year Risen has been hard at work on a book about the conduct of US intelligence agencies in the "war on terror" after 9/11, slated for release next spring. The book's launch will no doubt be accompanied by some new disclosure by Risen, designed to give the book lift up the charts. Perhaps that too will be a story he's been keeping in the larder for months. This lamentable synergy featured in Bob Woodward's journalistic calculations and also in the promotional circumstances of the book written by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War., The Times front-paged her stories in the paper in a manner designed to push the book up into Bestseller status. It was a clear conflict of interest that earned the paper plenty of money. This was when Miller was sent that envelope of white powder that turned out not to be anthrax spores, which gave the book yet another boost. Risen, we should remind our readers, is one of the reporters who smeared the late Gary Webb with the charge that Webb had overhyped his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series on the CIA/contra/cocaine connexions. Webb didn't pace his disclosures to suit a book-writing schedule. He only wrote his book after he'd been forced out of his job. CounterPunch readers may also recall that Risen was one of the New York Times reporters, along with Jeff Gerth, who raced into print with baseless smears that cost Wen Ho Lee almost a year of his life in solitary confinement, being threatened with the death penalty by FBI interrogators. On that occasion Risen and Gerth didn't wait a year to do additional reporting and fact checking. They rushed to do the government's bidding (relaying the smears of an Energy Department official who had it in for Wen Ho Lee) just as Risen and the New York Times clicked their heels in the NSA case, sitting on an explosive story through the 2004 election and for months thereafter, and even then agreeing to withhold certain facts. Such submissiveness on the part of the Times harks back to self censorship by the paper in the early 1950s, covering up CIA plans for coups in Guatemala and Iran; also to the paper's behavior in 1966 when it had information about IA shenanigans in Singapore and through south-east Asia. The editors submitted the story for review by CIA director John McCone, who made editorial deletions. In its Friday story, the New
York Times meekly agreed not to identify the "senior
White House official" who successfully petitioned them to
spike the story for a year. The fact that no one was specifically
named allowed Bush to discount the entire story when he went
the Lehrer News Hour on Friday evening.
|
from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                |
