Letters to the Editor
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I guess I just don't believe...
...the evolution of the article anymore. The evolution everybody has been using is that Joe Klein decided to mouth off about the FISA issue in an article on Tone Deaf Democrats, double checked by talking to one Democrat and one Republican, then totally botched his job and the article.
How about this: Joe Klein talked to the Republican first. This wasn't someone in the Republican Congressional delegation or a staffer of one, this was the Republican who has a background in intelligence and specifically arguing cases for the intelligence community before the FISA court.
This source was unclear about the progression of bills and which Democratic bill he was refering to, having made the mistake of believing that: The "bipartisan" White House/Senate Select Intelligence Committee compromise was introduced in both houses, and: The bill introduced and passed in the House and the bill that came out of the Senate Judiciary committee (known by the White House and the Republican intelligence people as "Chairman Leahy's Substitute") are also the same bill introduced in both houses.
The source complained about what is really near and dear to the NSA and the White House in the dispute, namely minimization and targeting, and about the necessity to provide information on foreign target individuals (check Klein's defenses, especially FISA Section Under Dispute). This is why he claims that the House bill is missing the opportunity to do minimization and targeting civil rights safeguards, even though it does do so. Furthermore, only this kind of source would have assumed the bill was quashed by Pelosi, rather than that it did not exist.
The source was following the script of Fact Sheet: Chairman Leahy's FISA Modernization Substitute: A Step Back for Our Nation's Security and apparently unaware that Klein was going to write about the House bill.
I am going to make the guess that the reason the source was unaware of Klein's subject matter was that the source initiated the conversation, it was not initiated by Klein researching for an article he had already started to write.
What followed is that Klein ended up with an indefensible article, and tried to defend it on the merits of what had been written, the stakes for both Klein and Time after Glenn started to criticize and the criticism gained legs at FDL, Berkeley and Berkham, became incredibly high -- falsifying is Jason Blair territory and Klein may have been willing to do a favor for a friend in the intelligence business, but he doesn't want to lose his job and career over it. But he is now stuck, since the facts were wrong.
Here is the crucial paragraph from the White House web site, where it complains about providing information on foreign individuals to the FISA court. Its part of a series of complaints about minimization, continuation, and rollbacks for data acquired but without proper approval:
The substitute would allow the FISA Court to review compliance with minimization procedures used for the acquisition of foreign intelligence information only from individuals outside the United States. This proposal could place the FISA Court in a position where it would be obligated to conduct individualized review of the Intelligence Community's foreign communications intelligence activities. This approach is inconsistent with the Court's role of approving generally applicable procedures rather than individual surveillance efforts.
The real game here is the one done in the MCA bill: to get permission to do illegal things and tie the hands of any court to roll them back -- in the future, not the past.
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@ondelette
I think you're probably exactly right. I know I've said this before, but I'm continually impressed by your posts. Your thinking is always extremely perceptive and clear.
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Couldn't follow one thing:
Furthermore, only this kind of source would have assumed the bill was quashed by Pelosi, rather than that it did not exist. -- ondelette
I agree with Jordan Orlando; you have an incredible grasp of this stuff. I haven't even read through the House FISA bill, much less the Leahy Senate version. But, why did you say that above about Klein's likely source? Why would an NSA-connected individual make this assumption?
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How do we contact TIME
Hi Glenn,
This is amazing work but please provide us contact information for time so that we can contact them.
May God bless You,
Ari
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ondolette on evolution
The evolution everybody has been using is that Joe Klein decided to mouth off about the FISA issue in an article on Tone Deaf Democrats, double checked by talking to one Democrat and one Republican, then totally botched his job and the article.
Essentially, your (very impressively detailed) alternative boils down to: someone decided for Joe Klein that he should mouth off about the FISA issue in an article on Tone Deaf Democrats, which he double checked by talking to one Bush administration national security official, then totally botched his job and the article.
So, sure, slightly different actors, but still the same pattern — Klein, and Time, taking their cues from the week's White House talking points via some intermediary, working up an article that uses all the required keywords, and so on. We all know the story by now.
Is it really necessary to postulate an elaborate and somewhat strange pattern of legislative ignorance on the part of either Klein or the unnamed actor?
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Juliebird
That, in a nutshell, describes several discussions I had with editors, back in another life. The whole "two sides to every story" is completely false, and wrong, and as long as they're trying to shove that down kids' throats in J-School, the longer this problem is gonna be around.
I'm sure that there are quite a few journalists who want to do the job right. Until there are more editors that let them, the MSM will continue to fail to be any of the things they claim to be.
I only wish the Net was as accessible 20 years ago.
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Ondolette's tale
What ondolette is essentially saying is that what may have happened, over those vodka rocks, is that the intelligence source may have started this by saying "you wouldn't believe what those clueless democrats are up to now" and either got confused over what the the house bill, vs the two senate bills contained--presumably based on third hand scuttlebutt bouncing around a demoralized agency. This is not necessarily a nefarious republican or insidious privacy killer at the NSA, but just another ticked off bureaucrat at the Congress not having a clue about how his agency works.
And it may also be possible that there either was a badly worded or better worded bill (doesn't matter which one) that Pelosi quashed, or, again, scuttlebutt said she quashed. (That seems unlikely; you'd expect the committee chair to do any such quashing first. But it's not unreasonable that she may had a conversation with the committee chair, and the nature of that conversation got expanded in the retelling.)
This is the stuff of Joe's world--his special connections with Iraq occupation functionaries, his sources in the intelligence community, the real guts of how things really run. And that's not really that bad a way of getting an idea of what is going on.
But the result was (and there's nothing for it but to label this as stemming from laziness) Joe framing an article around this story he heard, a story that turned out to be wrong, and that he didn't do the reporting necessary to double-check. And, as ondolette suggests, the bill tying the hands of the spy agency with ridiculous restrictions was at the very heart of the story. There's no way to "correct" the story; all you can do is retract it, because the basic premise of the story is wrong.
As ondolette says, this is like Jason Blair or Janet Cooke. Except it isn't. There was a great deal more malice aforethought in the those two cases. In her story, Joe doesn't make up the sources.
And I have to say that this does end up back on the old spineless democrat riff. Why isn't Pelosi demanding a retraction? Why isn't Emmanuel ripping Stengel a new one? Do you think John Boehner would let a distortion like this slide?
IAC, ondolette tells a good tale. It's almost certainly not correct in its detail, but the overall shape of it is a good story. It's easier to believe in error and laziness than stupid duplicity.
I still say if Joe can't find a Republican who will back his claim, on the record, that they need to retract this story. At the moment, TIME is left with the claim that Joe's secret republican sources say X. That's not enough to support the claim in the current version of the correction.
Pelosi and Holt should be demanding that TIME retract this story. Embarrassing for Joe, yes. But a firing offense, no, I wouldn't think so. An illustration that when you get a story wrong, you need to take forthright action, early, yes.
Most of all, as Glenn has said from the outset, this is not really about Klein. It's about TIME, and the rest of Beltway media. If this story had been "Tone-deaf republicans, ignoring polls, continue to carry Bush's water on illegal wiretaps," it would have received more scrutiny on its way from draft to press. If THAT story had been this badly sourced, it would not have run.