Timing, book raise questions

WASHINGTON — The New York Times' revelation Friday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping raised eyebrows in political and media circles, both for its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication.

In an unusual note, The New York Times said in its story that it held off publishing the article for a year after a meeting with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

The newspaper said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."

The paper offered no explanation to readers about what had changed to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" written by James Risen, the lead reporter on The New York Times' story Friday. The book will be published in mid-January, publisher Simon & Schuster said.

The decision to withhold the article caused friction within the newspaper's Washington, D.C., bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One said there was much discussion about whether the story could have been published earlier.

In a statement Friday, Executive Editor Bill Keller did not mention the book.

Keller wrote that, after agreeing last year not to publish the story, two things changed the paper's thinking. The paper developed a fuller picture of misgivings about the program by some in the government. And the paper satisfied itself through more reporting that it could write the story without exposing "any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record."

Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said it was conceivable The New York Times waited to publish its story as the Senate took up renewal of the Patriot Act. "It's not unheard of to wait for a news peg," he said. "It's not unusual to discover the existence of something and not know the context of it until later."

Friday's story was a dramatic scoop for a newspaper whose national-security coverage has been marked by turmoil in recent years. The paper admitted last year that much of its reporting on Iraq's weapons programs before the war was flawed. The principal author of those stories, Judith Miller, later spent 85 days in jail to protect the identity of an administration source in the CIA leak case.

More recently, the paper has been scooped by the Los Angeles Times on a story that the U.S. military has been secretly paying to run favorable stories in the Iraqi media and by The Washington Post on the revelation last month of a secret network of CIA prisons for terrorism suspects in foreign countries. The New York Times announced last week it was replacing its deputy bureau chief in D.C., which outsiders read as a sign of the paper's dissatisfaction with its coverage.