Newspaper Editorials Hit Back after Bush Criticizes Spy Story

By: E&P Staff Refusing to back down under criticism from the White House, The New York Times in a Sunday editorial calls for Congress to act on its revelations about a secret spying program against Americans. But many other major papers across the country also condemned the operation.

"President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence," the Times editorial declares. "We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them.

"Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling."

President Bush on Saturday had criticized the story and the leaks to the media that led to it. A Republican senator later attacked the Times for allegedly endangering lives (see other stories on this site).

In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order to allow spying on American citizens without obtaining a warrant.

"Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not," the Times editorial states. "Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them."

The Washington Post on Sunday also offered a sharp assessment in an editorial: "As with its infamous torture memorandum, the administration appears to have taken the position that the president is entitled to ignore a clearly worded criminal law when it proves inconvenient in the war on terrorism. ...

"Congress must make the administration explain itself. In the aftermath of the revelations, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said hearings on the matter would be a high priority in the coming year. That's good. It should be unthinkable for Congress to acquiesce to such a fundamental change in the law of domestic surveillance, particularly without."

Other Sunday editorials follow.

Kansas City Star: "Typically, the administration is offering the public only broad assurances that it has behaved properly and that there?s no reason to worry about the warrantless eavesdropping. But Congress and the American public are entitled to a more complete explanation of this ill-advised project."

Los Angeles Times: "[President Bush] is entitled to his own news judgment, but it reveals a lot about his willingness to disregard constitutional safeguards and civil liberties while pursuing the war on terrorism. To the rest of us, the revelation in the New York Times that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on people within the United States without judicial warrants was stunning. In one of the more egregious cases of governmental overreach in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the monitoring, without any judicial oversight, of international phone calls and e-mail messages from the United States."

St. Petersburg Times: "This is part of an imperial presidency that has emerged under Bush since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. On the authority of the executive branch alone, the administration has imprisoned people for years without charge, captured suspects and put them in secret overseas prisons, and engaged in interrogation techniques that violate domestic law and international treaties."

Denver Post: "Friday's revelation about NSA spying demonstrates that the administration has lost its sense of balance between essential anti-terrorism tools and encroachment on liberties. What's the clich? here? If we give up our liberties in the name of anti-terrorism, the terrorists have already won."