Bush Tried to Kill Post CIA Prison Story

Last week, we learned that Bush summoned New York Times editors to the Oval Office in an effort to kill the NSA domestic surveillance story.

Now we can add another summons to the list ... according to tomorrow's WaPo, Bush put pressure on the Post as well to kill its CIA secret prison story.

Neither newspaper complied.

Bush Presses Editors on Security

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 26, 2005; C01

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.

Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, would not confirm the meeting with Bush before publishing reporter Dana Priest's Nov. 2 article disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe used to interrogate terror suspects. Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, would not confirm that he, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman had an Oval Office sit-down with the president on Dec. 5, 11 days before reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that Bush had authorized eavesdropping on Americans and others within the United States without court orders.

But the meetings were confirmed by sources who have been briefed on them but are not authorized to comment because both sides had agreed to keep the sessions off the record. The White House had no comment.

It would be interesting to find out if these kind of official summonses are of recent vintage, or if they've been going on all long ... especially in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

And how strange is it to have an editor not confirm to a reporter about a story that the editor is involved in? The surreal aspect of the act of reporting being the story is getting more disorienting by the day.