NYT public ed.: Times delayed eavesdropping article before 2004 election

[DeepModem Mom]

The Public Editor
Eavesdropping and the Election: An Answer on the Question of Timing
By BYRON CALAME
Published: August 13, 2006


(NYT)
NYT public editor Byron Calame

THE NEW YORK TIMES’S Dec. 16 article that disclosed the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping has led to an important public debate about the once-secret program. And the decision to write about the program in the face of White House pressure deserved even more praise than I gave it in a January column, which focused on the paper’s inadequate explanation of why it had “delayed publication for a year.”...But contradictory post-publication comments by Times editors and others about just how long the article was held have left me increasingly concerned about one key question: Did The Times mislead readers by stating that any delay in publication came after the Nov. 2, 2004, presidential election?... I have now learned from Bill Keller, the executive editor, that The Times delayed publication of drafts of the eavesdropping article before the 2004 election....

***

A number of readers critical of the Bush administration have remained particularly suspicious of the article’s assertion that the publication delay dated back only “a year” to Dec. 16, 2004. They contend that pre-election disclosure of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping could have changed the outcome of the election....

***

Internal discussions about drafts of the article had been “dragging on for weeks” before the Nov. 2 election, Mr. Keller acknowledged. That process had included talks with the Bush administration. He said a fresh draft was the subject of internal deliberations “less than a week” before the election.

“The climactic discussion about whether to publish was right on the eve of the election,” Mr. Keller said. The pre-election discussions included Jill Abramson, a managing editor; Philip Taubman, the chief of the Washington bureau; Rebecca Corbett, the editor handling the story, and often Mr. Risen. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, was briefed, but Mr. Keller said the final decision to hold the story was his....He has repeatedly indicated that a major reason for the publication delays was the administration’s claim that everyone involved was satisfied with the program’s legality. Later, he has said, it became clear that questions about the program’s legality “loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/opinion/13pubed.html?...

[annabanana]

1. I wonder, . . what are they NOT publishing now?

What public opinion molding story is being kept suppressed until the second week of November?

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. Bomb plot! Timing is everything.

[Rex]

3. They work for the BFEE.

Didn't want Bushing losing. Should be criminal, but no such luck with Cheney at the helm.

[EFerrari]

8. They are the Brute Squad. n/t

[otohara]

4. We'll Never Know, Will We

Mr. Keller?

[stevedeshazer]

5. *gasp* But Sean and Rush and BillO told me that the NYT was "LIBURAL"!

Why would a left-wing mouthpiece fishwrapper bird cage liner like the NYT cover up for the Bush Cabal?

[Diane R]

6. Didn't they also kill the story about bush wearing a wire....

...during the debates with Kerry? I thought they had a story ready to go about the bulge under his jacket, but the story got killed.

What other stories did they surpress to help bush get elected? And what stories did they put out to help defeat Kerry?

[blm]

36. That's right. They had an article w/analysis from a NASA image analyst.

They killed it.

[Marr]

7. Oh, god- this passage is the worst:

"So why did the Dec. 16 article say The Times had 'delayed publication for a year,' specifically ruling out the possibility that the story had been held prior to the Nov. 2 election? 'It was probably inelegant wording,' Mr. Keller said, who added later, 'I don’t know what was in my head at the time.'"

Inelegant wording. Yeah, right. They covered for the Bush Administration, period. I can't believe the guy would try to explain that obvious fact away with a Rumsfeldian "gee golly, I don't know".

[Peace Patriot]

9. Any decent, trustworthy newspaper would have fired this crew long ago.

They let a "Mata Hari" who was conspiring with the Bush junta publish lie after lie on the front page of the NYT throughout the leadup to the Bush assault on Baghdad in which one hundred thousand innocent Iraqis died from the initial bombing alone.

Now this--conspiring to keep this criminal gang in office!

What they have done is in fact far more disreputable even than the above. It is false to think that any issue robbed Kerry of the election. How he got robbed is in the story they black-holed--the Bushite corporate takeover of our election system, during the 2002-2004 period, in which extremely insider hackable electronic voting systems were installed throughout the country--vote recording and tabulation systems run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

That was a fascist coup. And I can only think that these sons of bitches were in on it. Why didn't they warn American voters of the egregious violation of the security of our election system by pals of the Bush junta at Diebold and ES&S? What happened to our Democratic Party leadership during that period? What happened with election officials around the country, who were lavishly lobbied with junkets to the Beverly Hilton and bribed and lured by the power of secrecy, creating a culture of secrecy, collusion, and privatization thoughout our elections? And what of the main engineers of the Congressional bill that provided a $4 billion electronic boondoggle that would corrupt our election system from one end of the country to the other? Tom Delay and Bob Ney--both now resigned in disgrace over bribery scandals! The so-called "Help America Vote Act" was passing over Bob Ney's desk at the same time as the Abramoff bribes.

Where is investigative reporting in this country? Where is journalism? What the hell's wrong with these people?

And here are some other things they never warned us about...

DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and

ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things).

These are the people who "counted" 80% of the votes in this country in 2004! And you heard not one breath of this tremendous scandal in the NYT or anywhere in the war profiteering corporate news monopoly press.

[flyarm]

17. look into this..

sorry no working link..its old from my files..fly

Philip D.Zelikow also directed the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age under co-chairman James Barksdale, a Bush adviser and major Bush-Cheney donor. A 9/11 commissioner, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, also served with Zelikow on the task force. (Interestingly, the pair serves together on yet another panel – The National Commission on Federal Election Reform – with Gorton acting as vice-chairman and Zelikow as executive director.)

Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, insists Zelikow has a "clear conflict of interest." And she suspects he is in touch with Bush's political adviser, Rove, which she says would explain why the White House granted him, along with just one other commission official, the greatest access to the intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 suicide hijackings.

[EFerrari]

22. Here is a link. fly is right This same guy directed both

the 9/11 commission AND the "vote fraud" Carter commission.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[EFerrari]

23. More from sourcewatch:

Philip D. Zelikow is Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9-11 Commission.

There's a raft of evidence to suggest that Zelikow has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel.<1> (http://antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2209 ) Here are just a few of them:

* He and Rice worked closely together in the first Bush White House as aides to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Zelikow was director of European security affairs, and Rice was senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. Rice reportedly hired Zelikow. Both started in 1989 and left in 1991.

* A few years after leaving the White House, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together called, "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."

* The two associated again when Zelikow directed the Aspen Strategy Group <2> (http://www.aspeninstitute.org ), a foreign-policy strategy body co-chaired by Rice's mentor Scowcroft. Rice, along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were members.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Philip_D._Ze...

[flyarm]

30. thanks..it was too late my time and i was too tired to go deeper

in my files..thanks!

[UpInArms]

10. NYT's held off from publishing the NORC election 2000

I was waiting for the results - and doing my every morning emailing to request the publishing of those on September 11 - when the towers were hit - I'll never forget it.

After 9/11, the NYTs decided that they couldn't publish that story - it would upset too many people in a time of "national mourning" - I never really trusted anything from the NYTs again.

Who Won the Election? Who Cares?

On November 7, 2001, a reader of the political website MakeThemAccountable.com made a series of predictions about how the news media would cover a long anticipated review of uncounted Florida ballots from the 2000 presidential election:

The data will show that Gore won, but the article will be written to obscure that fact.... The headline will proclaim that Bush definitively won. The headline will be on page one.... The rest of the article, which will describe, albeit opaquely, that Gore really won, will be on .


That's pretty much what happened.

The study, dubbed a "double check on democracy" by the St. Petersburg Times (11/11/01), was spearheaded by a consortium of six major news organizations--the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Tribune Co. (parent of the L.A. Times), Associated Press and CNN--plus two Florida papers, the Palm Beach Post and St. Petersburg Times. In an effort costing nearly $1 million in pooled funds and some 10 months' work, the group rounded up uncounted ballots from all 67 Florida counties, then commissioned the University of Chicago's nonpartisan National Opinion Research Center to examine them.

After numerous unforeseen delays and a unanimous decision to postpone publication "indefinitely" so reporters could be mobilized to cover the terrorist aftermath, the completed data were released to the consortium by NORC near the first anniversary of the election. Each outlet independently crunched the votes according to nine recount scenarios and published the findings simultaneously on November 12. (All pieces cited in this article are from that date unless noted.)

The story/the spin

The study's key result: When the consortium tried to simulate a recount of all uncounted ballots statewide using six different standards for what constituted a vote, under each scenario they found enough new votes to have narrowly given the Florida election--and by extension the presidency--to Al Gore. Under three models that attempted to duplicate the various partial recounts that were asked for by Gore or ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, however, Bush maintained a slight margin of victory.

Coverage of these remarkable results by the eight consortium members, as well as by other major news outlets reporting their work, was remarkably uniform. Findings were interpreted and framed to support and justify the political status quo, reflecting a post=September 11 media tendency to reassures a panicked public that the American system is still intact.

...more...

[Peace Patriot]

12. This is a very important post and a very important thread. I think it's

vital to face the whole truth--that this has been a fascist coup--in order to strategize effectively against it. It is a unique kind of coup in many respects. We have no precedent for it. It has combined some quite subtle elements with crude power grabs. I think we still have a chance to restore our election system, but our window of opportunity to do that may not be that long--a year or two. This is one of the reasons I support the Absentee Ballot protest. If enough people vote Absentee (and many already are--it's up to 50% in Los Angeles), and flood local state/ election officials with MOUNTAINS of paper ballots, and refuse to vote on these election theft machines, and register a huge citizen "vote of no confidence" in the election system, we can FORCE reform NOW. AB votes aren't "safe" either, and this protest will NOT result in accurate counts this fall, but it could raise a big enough stink--a crisis, panic in the election theft industry--that we can push many election officials to the table. Many have developed such hostility to the public--in the culture of secrecy and privatization that Diebold/ES&S have fostered--that they don't think we have a right to say how our votes will be counted, or any right to review election data. We need to rebel! We need to refuse to vote on these diabolical machines.

There are many other problems with our election system, but this takes the cake--TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--code that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review. It is outrageous. It gives PRIVATE CORPORATIONS--Bushite corporations!--control over election results! It is the ultimate method of power and control. And we MUST break it! And we must break it SOON!

[EFerrari]

15. I think they're going to move on CA much sooner than that.

Remember, we heard that the BushCo "re-election team" have been here for months.

That's already very bad news because "re-election team" is a euphemism for election theft team. And, lookit what they've already managed to do here: Enron-->unseats Davis--->leaves Shelley vulnerable and then, ousts him from office--->McPherson recertifies Diebold --->54 ELECTORAL VOTES.

We don't have two years.

[Peace Patriot]

16. Well, since Los Angeles is such a hotbed of Absentee Ballot voting,

maybe this protest will light a fire in California voters' hearts, and take off here, save this state and sweep the nation.

There are wonderful things happening in the election reform movement--all sorts of new groups formed, many lawsuits filed, numerous books and reports and articles--but there is nothing on the horizon that can prevent Stolen Election III this fall. The Absentee Ballot protest has the potential to FORCE reform NOW, this winter, if election officials get hit with this AB voting rebellion on a massive scale.

[EFerrari]

20. Who is promoting this protest? I don't see a downside.

I vote absentee and have for years. But, we'd need massive organization to register people "absentee" and the clock it ticking.

[flyarm]

32. PLEASE READ MY POST #31..JUST VOTING ABSENTEE DOES NOTHING

unless you make people aware of making sure it counted!

fly

[flyarm]

31. i have equal fears with absentee ballots..though..

in Fla in 2004 we pushed absentee ballots for dems ..and we had perhaps the largest AB vote ever in the state..my fear is two fold..
first it gives the rethugs an early account of how many votes they have to steal it by..that added with early vote in some states ( we have early vote in fla) they have a pretty accurate accounting of how much they have to steal the vote by...

and two we had so much spoilage of absentee ballots..boxes and boxes in minority areas of Orlando were soaking wet and could not be read..and no there was no rain at any time on election day!..

and my county supervisor lost a huge box of absentee ballots under a table in the supervisors office that were never counted or ceritified..of course they weren't found under the table or desk until after the certifications went to the state..
many workers at soe office said many absentee ballots were thrown into boxes and were falling out of the overstuffed boxes and were all over the floors being stepped on and the readability was destroyed.

there was so much nonsence over the AB's, that it was beyond the pale..

if i can say anything..about Absentee ballots...

yes of course use them..but use them wisely and demand accountability of them from your superviosrs office..but do not mail in if you don't have to ..why give a forewarning of how many they have to steal the election by..hand deliver them the day of the election to the supervisors office, if your state allows that..
( but do check first)..do check the laws and proceedures first..know your rights!

yes hand deliver them on election day..to the supervisors office..if at all possible..for you..

delivering them to out posts, i do not trust..it was a church in orlando that destroyed so many black votes by absentee ballots

after you deliver your absentee ballot ..call the supervisors office and make sure your ballot was counted..the day after election..

so if ballots are missing you can demand to know why yours was not counted.
so if there are any ( ha ha ) missing boxes in the supervisors office they will be on notice that you want to know where your ballot is! and you are watching and expect accountability of your ballot..

just doing absentee ballot is not the end of your responsibility for your vote..stay on top of it..

do not just assume your absentee ballot was counted or even recieved ..even if you hand deliver it!

we had many missing in the mails before the 2004 election..after certification is too damn late to account for your vote..

oh and we had many thrown out saying the signatures did not match..

verify that your absentee ballot was recieved and counted!

from a fla poll watcher in 2004..

fly

[EFerrari]

33. I hear you. The found a box of ballots in the bay after our

last mayoral election.

[bvar22]

34. Absentee Ballots "counted" by entering on an unsupervised DRE!!!

See this video from Riverside, CA.

Voting Absentee could be WORSE than voting on Election Day.

[flyarm]

35. yes you are correct

and many counties and states do not count absentee ballots unless the election is close..thats why i say know your laws!

and yes they are being tabulated by the states in the dre machines..so is there any way we can count on our vote counting..no..not if you have a state with dre machines..if the tabulation is done by machine..

and are we screwed.. you bet we are..

i have often laid awake at night since the 2004 election and wondered ..would we have been better off not hsving so many absentee ballots and given the rethugs so much heads up on what they needed to steal it by..i just don't have the answer for that..but it has given me many sleepless nights wondering..

and i am dead set against early vote..i think it is a recipe for stolen elections!

if you are worried about sleep overs for machines in san diego..just have the machines set up for 2 weeks and in offices , courts houses..etc..and the chain of command for them is ..well non existant...

i was a poll watcher for early vote and our "old boys " network in fla was disgusting to say the least..and we had lwyers from all over the country trying to help us..but in my opinion..it was an excersize in frutality...

i was poll watcher and was kept as far away from the machines as possible..in one court house..i could not even see the machines..they were in a room and i was forbidden to even enter the room..and a 6'6 huge guy was watching me and trying to intimidate me..( it did not work) smug and staring at me 10-15 hour a day..
but i could not and never did see the machines..i had two NY lawyers that came ( kerry lawyers)to help me but they almost got into fisticuffs with the guy who over saw the machines..it was that contentious..

i did see the machines in the supervisors office for early vote ( i was a poll watcher "at large" so i was moved around ) but there were problems even there in the supervisors offices..

i really do not like early vote ..so if you don't have it..never allow it! its a cheaters paradise!

the only way i see us doing anything about these problems is vigilance..and getting so many voters to the polls that it makes stealing it almost impossible to steal enough for them to take it..

and with that..i say..get off your asses and volunteer to drive seniors to vote..go to seniors homes and drive them to the polls or help them get absentee ballots and get them to the polling places..
it is going to take effort by everyone..

turn the computers off..and get out there...

don't bitch if you are sitting home and just talking about it..

go do the work nessesary..

will we stop the stealing it..no....but i am going to do everything i can to make it harder than hell for them to do it and succeed.

fly

[DeepModem Mom]

18. Thanks for adding this to the thread, UpInArms! nt

[originalpckelly]

11. Those rabid liberals passed up an opportunity to hurt Bush?

[orleans]

13. shame on all of them

the owner, editors, all of them

shame shame shame

in their stupid attempt to be "fair" or whatever the fuck they were going for they managed to fuck over the rest of this country.

may none of them sleep at night.

[jwirr]

14. What ever happened to Jefferson's informed voters?

[Bozita]

19. This totally infuriates me

"News" isn't something to be placed in the deep-freeze because it might have repercussions.

The NYT failed not only its readers but the entire country.

Damn every one of those folks who acted to delay the publishing.

[EFerrari]

21. Why did this column come out now. I keep coming back to that.

I don't buy the neat story, "I was increasingly concerned".

What's going on here?

[JerseygirlCT]

24. Yes, exactly. nt

[EFerrari]

26. We figured this out last December. Here is the DU thread that

I sent to the new Public Editor. I in turn received an auto response, then about two weeks later, a different auto response that said the Public Editor reads everything sent to him. That was a little strange.

So, they've known for quite a while that a number of us know that they deliberately tried to influence the election.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[Bozita]

25. imho, THIS is the "Story of the Year"

I read it three hours ago and my blood's still boiling.

[mrdmk]

27. I e-mailed the NYT this reply to their article back in Nov 2005

"Thank-you very much for the constitutional crises."

Since then to me, their reporting has not improved on bit, I have attempted many times to get my wife to discontinue the Sunday subscription. It has been very much considered many times since then.

[EFerrari]

29. Out of curiosity, what did you think you knew last November? n/t

[mrdmk]

37. Excuse me! I meant December 16, 2005

This whole issue is beyond pale. Instead of back-dating bills to clear the President, the Congress and Senate needs to be having hearings on the subject. Besides the fact that New York Times also kept the matter from the public is also cause for concern.

[kentuck]

28. Keller should be kicked out.

Immediately.

[hatrack]

38. This from the paper that allowed Judy Miller to negotiate her departure

Why am I not surprised? Why am I not surprised in the slightest fucking degree?