Paranoia on the left and the right

WHEN George W. Bush promised that his administration would promote faith-based initiatives, who would have guessed that one of them would involve asserting the divine right of presidents?

Well, now we know.

All it took to find out was this last week of controversy and bitter contention over the New York Times’ revelation that the president has authorized the most secretive of American spy operations -- the National Security Agency -- to eavesdrop on domestic communications without bothering with the cumbersome formality of obtaining a warrant.

It is a controversy that also has forcefully reminded anyone who cares to notice that serious reporting on issues involving national security is not only the trickiest journalistic obligation that a news organization can assume, but also -- in these days, at least -- the most thankless.

The president’s argument that he has the power to order warrantless wiretaps on suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, and apparently others, has twisted and turned through the week’s news like a corkscrew. At the end of the day, it boils down to little more than: I want to do it because I think it’s the right thing and I want to, and besides that, Congress told me I could, unless it didn’t, in which case I can anyway because I’m the president. Oh yeah, and getting these warrants is really inconvenient. (As a fuller picture of the operation of the secret judicial panel that grants 99.5% of all such warrants requested emerges, it appears that the only way to make it more convenient would be to install a drive-through window.)

The Founders were wise about many things -- not least in their insistence on disciplining governmental power through the imposition of checks and balances and in their aversion to warrantless searches. They also were shrewd in their intuition that faction, which is how they styled rigid partisanship, made people behave stupidly. These days, it’s sometimes difficult to avoid the suspicion that we are ever more firmly divided not into red states and blue states, but into left-wing paranoids and right-wing paranoids.

It’s hard to recall a moment in recent history when as many serious news organizations have done quite as timely and probing a job of reporting on national security and intelligence issues. The Los Angeles Times’ stories on the military’s subversion of the Iraqi press are one example. The Washington Post’s superb stories on the CIA’s secret prisons were another, as were the ABC News accounts of the torture going on there and elsewhere. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s story on domestic spying in the New York Times was a similarly thorough and judicious exercise in the sort of essential public service that justifies newspapers’ existence. (Full disclosure: Both reporters are former Los Angeles Times colleagues, and Risen and this writer worked together on the paper’s national staff.)

It says more about the national climate than it does the New York Times’ journalism that the paper immediately was assailed from the left and the right. Bush called the report “shameful” and said he expected the Justice Department to look for the source of the leaks. (Somebody had better check to see if they’re sweeping out Judith Miller’s cell.)

That was predictable enough, but then conservatives began to allege that the story’s publication had been timed either -- depending on who was making the charge -- to embolden Senate resistance to extension of the Patriot Act or distract attention from positive news of the Iraqi elections. On one of the many conservative talk radio shows that would unequivocally support Bush if he unilaterally ordered the imposition of martial law, weekly human sacrifice and readoption of the Julian Calendar, John Eastman, a law professor from Chapman University, went so far as to allege that “the New York Times and whoever in the Department of Justice or in the National Security Agency leaked this ongoing tool in [the war on terrorism] have very likely committed treason.”

Whoa, that’s a big one.

Meanwhile, just to prove that the paranoid style may be this country’s last remaining artifact of bipartisanship, the paper’s left-wing critics were having a field day with the fact that the New York Times waited a full year between the time it first learned of the spy program’s existence and the publication of its story. Initially, according to its own accounts, the paper yielded to the administration’s warnings that the story would endanger ongoing antiterrorism operations. Subsequent reporting on the program’s operation and additional editing of sensitive material led the Times to a different conclusion. Earlier this month, the paper’s publisher, editor and Washington bureau chief privately met with Bush in the Oval Office to hear his objections to the story.

Then they published.

Left-wing critics since have alleged that the story was held so as not to imperil Bush’s reelection and that it was published now only because Risen’s book on the administration and the CIA, which is forthcoming next month, contains much of this material. (It’s worth noting that a Republican congressman from Texas, John Cornyn, saw this same sequence as evidence that the Times timed publication to hype Risen’s book. There’s that bipartisan paranoia again.)

Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, responded to all this with a statement saying that “publication was not timed to the Iraqi election, the Patriot Act debate, Jim’s forthcoming book or any other event. We published the story when we did because after much hard work it was fully reported, checked and ready, and because after listening respectfully to the administration’s objections, we were convinced there was no good reason not to publish it.”

Now that isn’t going to satisfy anybody, unless of course they’ve ever been around investigative reporting or newspapers. It is in the nature of investigative reporters to believe in their work and push to get it in the paper yesterday. It’s the job of editors to caution, restrain, rethink, second guess and demand more -- more reporting, more thought, more rewriting. It’s a virtually primeval struggle reenacted daily in every newsroom where real journalism still occurs. Nothing about this should surprise anyone -- unless he or she is already convinced that the country’s major newspapers are biased participants in some vast and amorphous conspiracy or his or her brain has gone soft from watching too many reruns of “All the President’s Men.”

Why anyone would believe that an institution as vast and varied as a modern metropolitan newspaper ever could be disciplined into something as organized as a conspiracy is a question for the therapists to answer. The fact is that seas of antacids are consumed yearly by editors utterly frustrated over their inability to bend the average newsroom to their will.

Let’s imagine for a second that a cabal of New York Times executives and editors got together in a room and plotted, depending on the direction your paranoia inclines, to withhold Risen and Lichtblau’s story so as to ensure Bush’s reelection, or to run it to block extension of the Patriot Act. Exactly how would that conversation go and, more important, how on God’s green earth would it ever be kept quiet? If the National Security Agency, the most secretive bureaucracy ever spawned by Washington, can’t keep a clamp on information about an illegal domestic spying operation, how could a bunch of editors keep a secret in a building filled with professional snoops and irrepressible gossips, which is what a newspaper is?

The New York Times deserves thanks and admiration for the service it has done the nation. Instead, it’s getting bipartisan abuse and another round of endless demands for explanations and “transparency.” (In case you haven’t noticed, “transparency” is this year’s “closure.”)

It’s the eve of both Christmas and Hanukkah, and that’s where this American nation is -- deadly peril without and divisive confusion at home. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, “God bless Us, Every One!”

We need it.