New York Times Clears National Security Stories with the Government Before Publication. Source: New York Times

New York Times response to Donald Trump's attack on the Times story revealing recent U.S. cyber-attacks against Russia

by Thomas Neuburger

The New York Times has just admitted that it clears national security stories with the government before it publishes them. We've already known this occurred some of the time — see "How the NY Times & U.S. Government Worked Together to Suppress James Risen’s Post-9/11 Reporting." It now looks like it occurs most of the time, if not all of the time.

The source for the revelation, at least in the current instance, is the New York Times.

This find is courtesy of Ben Norton, writing at Grayzone:

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”

“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.

The reason always given for the government suppressing a national security story is, of course, that lives will be put in danger, even when they won't. The following is Risen, as reported by Norton, talking about this arrangement between Times editors and the government, an arrangement he once went along with, but then grew to distrust:

Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” ... There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”

“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported [sic] said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.

This practice applied not only after 9/11 and the Iraq War, but long afterward as well:

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”

The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”

“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”

I've written before that the U.S. is one of the most heavily propagandized nations in the world, most recently here ("ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications"). This propaganda takes many forms, from the soft propaganda of military intervention into movie content (see this criticism of the film Pitch Perfect 3, "I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda.") to the hard propaganda of former generals, admirals and security officials masquerading as "independent analysts" on news programs where they usually advocate for unpopular government policies, like war (see Lee Fang's "Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?" and "Pentagon military analyst program" at SourceWatch).

We now know, if there was any doubt, that those heroes of the #Resistance at the New York Times, by their own admission, have been fully folded into the government's media "information" project. Good to know.

Ignoring the Elected President

Side note: It's understandable, in a way, that in the current panicky environment, administration employees are treating the president, their boss, as someone to withhold information from, as they did in the case of the U.S. military's cyber-intrusion into the Russian power grid. Again, according to the New York Times (emphasis added):

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials[.]

Is this a precedent, though, we want to cheer or set? The act of cementing in place an American Praetorian Guard with a publicly sanctioned veto over decisions of an elected head of state, once done, won't be undone easily.

Is this what we want our next constitution to become, a state in which it's OK for elected officials to be publicly frustrated by their unelected subordinates? One must consider the future before radically altering the present.

I've said this before, but consider: If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus, on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) ... and for good measure, started jailing bankers again...

...if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?

How much would be kept from him by "his" administration? How many who work for him would openly block his agenda, using the security state's propaganda resources (such as the New York Times) to defend their actions?

How much of the future are we willing to sacrifice in order to fix the present? After all, if Establishment leaders really want to be rid of President Trump, there's a fully constitutional method for doing it — impeachment. Instead they seem to be choosing these anti-constitutional methods.

This is a plan that will backfire. Once a nation opens the door to rule by its security elite, as the U.S. has increasingly done, the guardians and beneficiaries of that door almost never let it be closed.

Word to the wise.