* * * * *

            As I hope you could tell, Lichtblau, as said, tries to support the editors’ decision not to publish for over a year.  He defends the editors as acting in good faith and desiring to be careful journalists.  He even says, in defending the initial decision not to publish, that reporters “have a built-in backstop, a check and balance, and its called the editor.”  (P. 196.)

            But Lichtblau’s effort fails for two reasons.  The less important one concerns the criticism the paper received for allegedly engaging in a last minute ploy to affect the election by publishing a story about the failure to protect munitions in Baghdad.  This was obviously on the editors’ minds.  While Lichtblau claims it shows that a story that was solidly based wouldn’t be delayed by the editor to avoid hurting Bush in the election, the context of Lichtblau’s tale causes one to think the opposite is true.  For the context necessarily causes one to suspect that the question of whether the story would be considered to be sufficiently solidly based was deeply affected by the fact that it could have an impact on the election and for that reason would give rise to infuriated criticism from conservatives.

            The other, far more important reason relates to the fact that Keller’s “central question” was “whether, as the administration so urgently insisted, the story would harm national security.”  (P. 197.)

            Today, over 3½ years later, we know that they almost surely were right who argued early on that (as Lichtblau himself seems to have thought) the NSA story would cause no harm to the U.S. because Al Qaeda had to already have been concerned for other reasons entirely that its electronic communications were likely being intercepted and that it had to take steps to ensure that the interception would not injure or destroy it.  But let me nonetheless put this to one side, and discuss instead only what Keller and the other editors should have recognized on the basis of knowledge of the Bush administration that the Times must have had by October 2004, and what the applicable lessons of journalism history were.

            What the Times had to have known by October 2004 was that the Bush administration could not be trusted because fact after fact showed it would say and do anything to accomplish its ends, regardless of how dishonest or immoral its statements or

conduct were.  Here are just a few of the matters showing this that were in the public domain by October 2004, most or all of them having been written about, and some even having been initially disclosed, by the Times itself.  (I am confident of the timing here because I took the relevant matters from blogs I wrote in the spring and summer of 2004.  Many of the blogs, most of them really, got the information from the Times itself.)  By October 2004 it was known -- and often had been known for a pretty long time - - that:

            ·          The administration had lied about WMDs.

·          It had made a horrible misassessment of the manpower required for Iraq, had wrongly claimed it could succeed on the cheap, and had not recognized that Saddam could, as he did, prepare a guerrilla war.

·          It had fired General Shinseki for telling the truth about the manpower that would be needed.

·          It had fired Larry Lindsay for saying the war would cost far more than the administration claimed.

            ·          Torture memos had been produced.

            ·          Torture had been used.

            ·          Prisoners had been killed.

·          Innocent people had been swept off the streets and kept in jail for long periods.

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