Jonathan Alter reports that on 6 December 2005, “Bush summoned (New York) Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story.”
I couldn’t watch George’s news conference despite C-Span running it over and again. His attitude is caustic and his voice is churlish. Despite the hours polishing his oratory skills his delivery remains high schoolish. Likely, his parents designed that stump he issues edicts from and told him he was born to rule from it, but that’s an explanation for his tryannical behaviour, not a reason to feel sorry for the fear-mongering, lying wretch.
Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.
So why did George violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and bypass the administration-friendly secret court?
BuzzFlash writes:
In short, if the American public were to see the list of hundreds — and perhaps thousands of people according to the New York Times — the Bush Administration violated the law to spy on, we might see names akin to Nixon’s “enemies list.” Only in this case, it would be Bush’s “enemies list.”
Why, we might see names like Joe and Valerie Wilson, or Richard Clarke, or Cindy Sheehan, among others. The White House wouldn’t want even a secret court to know that it was spying on political enemies. This was exactly why the FISA law was passed. To prevent just such illegal political spying by the White House.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the antipoverty groups George is spying on are potential targets of the stealth campaigning that’s been ongoing since Katrina’s devastation. Vicious stuff. When Haley Barbourous told the House panel last week that his favourite saying was “We Shoot Looters” his smirk was an extension of the ugly campaign, the gist of which goes like this; If you were stuck in New Orleans you must be a welfare whore and deserved to die and the people and organisations who help you are poverty pimps and part of a Communist conspiracy. I don’t have to go to sites like RedState.org to read this venom. A man at my work prints off copies and brings them in as if he was the conservative I.F. Stone delivering suppressed news to the people. He broods over them with others, many of whom have a farm subsidy cheque in one hand and one for drought relief in the other, or are related to someone who does.
And why did the New York Times sit on the story for a year?
Update: Sen. Jay Rockefeller has released a handwritten letter he’s been saving for this moment.
He wrote it to Cheney in 2003, after he learned about the wiretapping-without-FISA-court-approval maneuver. It’s handwritten — because no one in the meeting could tell anyone else about it, not even a typist. Rockefeller told Cheney he could not endorse the program. He said he was keeping a sealed copy of the letter — for a moment just like this.