Bush's Snoopgate
The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times' eavesdropping story, he summoned the paper's editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasn't just out of concern about national security.
Jonathan Alter's Dec 19th Newsweek article describes the White House's attempts - and Bush's personal intervention - to try to stop the publication of his illegal spying offenses.
President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate--he made it seem as if those who didn't agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda--but it will not work. We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
(emphasis added)
What would Bush have said to try to derail the publication? Surely, the NY Times knew the spying was ILLEGAL. Why didn't they ALSO include the president's pleas not to publish...? Well.... They had already held the story for more than a year. The NY Times shares a lot of guilt in Bush even being president. They should have printed the story when they discovered it, not held off for a year.
I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned 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. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president's desperation.
All of Bush's claims that he was acting legally are FALSE:
No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story--which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year--because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had "legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force." But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing "all necessary force" in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.
(emphasis added)
And as we have all read by now, Bush's allusions to the FISA court being slow or difficult are also not true:
What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow--as the president seemed to claim in his press conference--or in any way required extra-constitutional action.
The only remaining conclusion: Bush truly believes he is above the law; that acting as a "war-time president" provides him supreme powers, unrestrained by Federal Statute or the U.S. Constitution.