More on domestic surveillance

Holy cow. That story I posted earlier about the anti-war groups being "monitored" by the FBI isn't even the big domestic surveillance story today. The New York Times dug up evidence that the President also gave an executive order authorizing the surveillance of individuals. The argument about illegality and unconstitutionality that I posted earlier was actually made in reference to this latter action, not the former. Mea culpa for getting those two switched earlier (though I'm willing to bet the same argument applies to both cases).

This story gets bigger, however: it appears the NYT sat on this story for about a year. Sitting on such an important story, one about a serious breach of public trust, not to mention the law, would be a bad enough idea. The Times, however, may have had the goods on this story before election day, thus impacting the election by their choice not to inform us about our candidates.

This, of course, is not the only little nugget of information that the media sat on until after the election. There was also the Valerie Plame affair and the CBS report undermining the Administration's case for war in Iraq. As Will Brunch put it:

"Voters could have gone to the polls on Election Day, Nov. 4 [sic], 2004, knowing that Bush was spying on Americans, that a key White House aide was charged with felonies, and that the initial rationales for Iraq were bogus.

And so it turns out that the media had the power to alter this country's disastrous direction back in 2004, after all. And we didn't even have to click our heels three times.

We'd only needed to do our job."