Some Hard Questions for the New York Times

Everyone is digging as fast as they can into the story of Bush using the NSA to secretly spy on Americans without a court order. The news was brought to us by the New York Times. However, in the midst of all these revelations, R.J. Eskow at The Huffington Post, swings the line of inquiry back to the Gray Lady herself. He has five important questions which we should be asking the editors at the Times while we wait for Congress to investigate these secret orders. The article mentions that the paper sat on this story for "over a year" before printing it. Consider the following:

1) Does that "one year delay" mean that the article would have been published in December 2004 -- or earlier?

2) Specifically, were you aware of the existence of a large-scale domestic spying operation prior to the 2004 elections -- and did you suppress the story before then?

3) Do you consider it appropriate for a newspaper to conceal evidence of potentially illegal government activity for a year? If so, under what grounds?

4) Which officials in the Administration asked you to delay publication of this story?

5) Will the New York Times conduct a public investigation of its decision to delay publication, so it can demonstrate to its readers than the decision was genuinely based on national security -- and not just another case of press manipulation for political purposes?

We haven't forgotten, nor shall we likely forget any time soon, the experiences we had with Judy Kneepads and the Times complicit involvement in ginning up support for the Iraq war and acting as an unquestioning mouthpiece for the Bush administration. Their performance, at one point, drove Ron to drop his link to the Paper of Record entirely for a period of time. Eskow asks some very painful questions of the New York Times and I think we deserve answers. Did they sit on this story all through the 2004 election cycle? And if so, what was their motivation to do so?

Previous posts:
The Imperial Tyrannical Presidency
Breaking the law in the name of the war on terror