· Innocent people had been swept off the streets and kept in jail for long periods.
· Secret prisons abroad were being used.
· Renditions were being engaged in for purposes of torture.
· Military tribunals had been created because the administration knew that evidence had been gotten by torture and coercion that precluded successful prosecutions in civilian criminal courts.
· The administration claimed the Geneva Conventions did not apply.
· Chalabi was a bust.
· George Tenet was an incompetent and a liar.
· Valerie Plame had been unlawfully outed.
· Bush was a nonreading, incurious fundamentalist zealot.
· Prisoners had recanted because statements were elicited by torture.
· Prisoners were held incommunicado for years.
· The administration was deeply secretive.
There is an old saying in this country that is a comment on a person’s lack of truthfulness: “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Well, with all the above having become known by mid to fall 2004, would you have bought a used car from George W. Bush or his administration? They were all known to be untrustworthy, deeply secretive, often deceitful people. Yet despite what already was known about them, Keller was worried that their statements about the NSA program were true? -- that the program was absolutely essential for national security? that everyone in government thought it legal (by the way, there is no statement in Lichtblau’s book that the Times sought the confidential advice of its own high powered lawyers about this)? that the program would have to be shut down immediately if the story were published? that the Times would have blood on its hands? Keller bought all this swill and for that reason he and Taubman nixed publication of a hugely important story about conduct so outrageous that the story would have changed the election results and enabled the country to rid itself of a walking disaster?
It is obvious, as it has been for a long time for reasons discussed here previously, that Keller has awful judgment. The defense provided for him by Lichtblau -- that he was worried about claims the Times would jeopardize national security -- won’t wash because, if it is true, it is simply another sign of Keller’s horrible judgment. One can almost guarantee that, if it were the unpopular Howell Raines asserting the defense, instead of the popular Bill Keller, he would be out on his ass in the proverbial New York minute.
In addition to showing credulous bad judgment in October and November of 2004, the pertinent editors ignored lessons of history, including the Times’ own history. Lichtblau says that “Few episodes in the history of the Times, or for that matter in all of journalism, had left as indelible a mark” as the Pentagon Papers case (p. 210), so that learning in late 2005 that the administration was considering seeking a Pentagon Papers type of injunction “was a bombshell” that “helped seal the decision” to publish. (Ibid.) Well, it is sarcastic to say so, but one is of course delighted that over a year after the most important horse was out of the barn -- Bush was reelected - - the Times remembered the Pentagon Papers case, or at least the attempted injunction aspect of it. But how come it did not remember a different but crucial aspect of the case, in October and November 2004? How come it did not remember that the reasons the Government claimed publication of the Papers would harm national security were all false, were all plain bullshit, and were subsequently admitted to be false (i.e., were admitted to be bullshit) by Erwin Griswold, the esteemed Solicitor General (and former long-time Dean of the Harvard Law School) who argued for the requested injunction in the Supreme Court? Remembering that the Government had lied in its Pentagon Papers efforts --remembering history -- might have given one pause before believing that an administration already known to lie was telling the truth now.
As well, how come Keller and company did not remember that the Times helped foster disaster when, in 1961, it went along with Kennedy’s request not to print a story that would have disclosed, and nullified the possibility of, the forthcoming Bay of Pigs invasion, which turned out to be such a disaster that Kennedy later remarked that he wished the Times had ignored his request to suppress the story?
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