Speculation Builds Over Why 'NYT' Put off Bush Spying Scoop

By: E&P Staff President Bush has personally authorized a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States more than three dozen times since October 2001, a senior intelligence official told The Associated Press Friday night.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post said in a Saturday article that The New York Times' revelation yesterday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping "raised eyebrows in political and media circles, for both its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication."

The Times has said that it held off publishing the article for a year, explaining that the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

It also disclosed that officials had assured senior editors of The Times "that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions."

Some speculate that the newspaper had waited for a "news peg" to publish the piece, perhaps finding it in the Patriot Act debate this week. But the paper, the Washington Post pointed out, did not say what had changed in the past year and "also did not disclose that the information is included" in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, co-author of the Friday story.

The book will be published in January by Simon & Schuster.
The Drudge Report first made the charge that the Times needed to beat-the-book early on Friday.

"The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper," the Post reports. "Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier."

In a statement Friday, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote that when the Times became aware that the NSA was conducting domestic wiretaps without warrants, "the Administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security."

"Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions," Keller continued. "As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that time."

In the ensuing months, Keller wrote, the paper satisfied itself through more reporting that it could write the story without exposing "any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record."

The disclosure follows angry demands by lawmakers earlier in the day for a congressional inquiry into whether the monitoring by the highly secretive National Security Agency violated civil liberties.

"There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," declared Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He promised hearings early next year.