Is he a hero or a villain?
Eric Lichtblau, author of “Bush’s Law,” is the New York Times reporter who exposed classified information on two federal anti-terrorist surveillance programs. His new book is advertised as “the unprecedented account of how the Bush administration employed its ‘war on terror’ to mask the most radical remaking of American justice in generations.” The quotation marks around “war on terror” are warning flags regarding the ideological sympathies of both Lichtblau and Times editor Bill Keller, who has defended Lichtblau’s reporting against White House and conservative outrage.
Lichtblau’s first scoop (both were co-authored with colleague James Risen) revealed the National Security Agency’s warrantless monitoring of international communications involving terrorist suspects – or, in misleading Times-speak, “domestic eavesdropping.” The Pulitzer-winning duo later exposed a monitoring program involving SWIFT, an international banking operation officials had been successfully probing for terror leads.
In the book, Lichtblau gathers up troubling anecdotes of botched cases and bureaucratic overreach in the months after 9/11 to conclude with typical overstatement that, after the Towers fell, “Guilt and innocence became almost antiquated notions.”
He’s dubious about terrorist tips from the public: “Still, the tips came. A clerk at a rental agency thought it odd that some Muslim men had returned a rental truck so soon. An assistant at the photo-developing shop noticed shots of New York City landmarks on a roll of film .ñ.ñ. Every lead now had to be followed; discretion was a thing of the past.”
But how would Lichtblau (and the Times) react if an uninvestigated lead turned tragic?
Lichtblau rarely turns his prodigious journalistic energy toward digging out the successes of NSA’s warrantless surveillance, which he clearly thinks is illegal. Surveying the administration’s pleas not to run the surveillance story, Lichtblau states baldly: “The image we’d been presented a year earlier in our meetings with the administration of a united front – with unflinching support for the program and its legality – was largely a façade. The administration, it seemed clear to me, had lied to us.”
His heroes are liberals like the “staunch defender of civil liberties” Sen. Russ Feingold. And much ardor is spent defending “well respected” Clinton Justice Department official and 9/11 commission member Jamie Gorelick against Attorney General John Ashcroft’s “McCarthyesque” accusations. (Ashcroft claimed a Gorelick memo helped build the “wall” between intelligence officers and criminal investigators, preventing their sharing counterterrorism information.)
The villains are equally obvious. There is “fearsome,” “ultraconservative” Ashcroft, but Lichtblau’s true contempt is reserved for Ashcroft’s successor, the admittedly hard-to-defend Alberto Gonzales. (Bush’s own screen time in “Bush’s Law” is surprisingly sparse.)
Lichtblau may fancy himself another Bob Woodward, but there’s little cloak-and-dagger here. A brief mention of meeting a source at a “coffee shop in the shadows of Washington’s power corridors” won’t send screenwriters rushing to their laptops.
Mostly, Lichtblau is preoccupied with getting scooped. Check his response when it looked as if the Times wouldn’t run the NSA story: “Each tidbit that came out .ñ.ñ. set off fears in my mind, real and imagined, that the story would break publicly somewhere else, and my own paper would get beat.” A journalist who believed the Constitution was being massacred daily by Ashcroft & Co. was primarily worried another newspaper might expose the outrage first? Sure, save the American way of life – just make sure my byline’s on it.
“Bush’s Law” isn’t totally misguided. Lichtblau ably diagnoses the FBI’s dysfunction and bureaucratic bumbling: “For years after the explosion of the Internet, agents couldn’t e-mail one another. The FBI’s software system made it next to impossible to transmit photos as attachments, so when 9/11 hit, a Florida field office had to overnight photos of the suspected hijackers to Washington.”
But there are too many self-important sentences like: “If the Curt Weldons and Alberto Gonzaleses of the world got to decide what the public had a right to know, I thought, we were all in trouble.” How fortunate we all are that the Lichtblaus and Kellers have taken up that responsibility instead.
There has been no terrorist attack on US soil in six years, which Lichtblau attributes vaguely to “smarter defense, or stronger offense, or luck, or patience by al Qaeda.” That seems uncharitable. Isn’t it just possible that the Bush administration, amid the easily mocked color-coded warnings and other fumbling, has done something right? If so, don’t expect to read it from Lichtblau.
Clay Waters is director of Times Watch, a division of the Media Research Center.
Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice
by Eric Lichtblau
Pantheon Books