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News & ArtsTuesday, February 16, 2010
War NYT's Executive Editor Talks about Why They Held the Story of the Captured Taliban Commander Until Yesterday
Posted by Christopher Frizzelle on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:17 PM
Bill Keller fields a few questions about the timing of this story the NYT broke yesterday. Part of the interview:
What’s the kind of bar that you have to come up to in order to decide that a story is worth holding at someone else’s request? Do you have to check in to make sure the White House isn’t making that request for their own spoken selfish reasons?
KELLER: It’s complicated. On the one hand I don’t have subpoena power, I don’t have spies in the National Security Agency, so knowing whether publishing a story would actually put national security at risk is a harder thing for me to figure out than it would be for somebody who’s actually in the government. But we do our best job at doing that and we take these requests quite seriously. I think the first one that I ever dealt with was when I was foreign editor in the Clinton administration, and we learned that there was a large unsecured stash of highly enriched uranium in the former soviet republic of Georgia. We held the story until the material was secured. That was not that hard a call...
3
@2 - not really. The Taliban didn't attack us on 9-11, it was al-Qaeda, and they're still supported primarily by Saudi Arabia.
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