Time magazine refused to either publicly acknowledge or correct the record after receiving the following letter from the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees.
To the editors of TIME Magazine
Joe Klein recently criticized the RESTORE Act (“The Tone Deaf Democrats,” Nov. 21, 2007), claiming that it “would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court.” This is incorrect. The RESTORE Act creates “basket” authorizations to allow widespread surveillance of foreign powers (such as Al Qaeda) and their agents. To prevent a repeat of the Bush Administration’s extra-legal warrantless wiretapping program, the court must approve the parameters of the group surveillance to ensure that warrants are still obtained for Americans’ communications. But no court orders are required for surveillance of foreigners reasonably believed to be outside of the country. The bill simply will not make our intelligence agencies get thousands of warrants for foreign terrorists.
The RESTORE Act’s blend of executive branch flexibility, court approval, and congressional oversight is calibrated to ensure that the fight against terrorism is conducted in an efficient and constitutional manner. We would hope that Mr. Klein, having studied the RESTORE Act further, is no longer so confused as to continue to characterize our system of constitutional checks and balances as “well beyond stupid.”
John Conyers, Jr. and Silvestre Reyes
I have written letters to the editor to Time magazine and been disappointed that they didn’t publish them, but I am not a congressional committee chair. If Time Newsweek can offer a column to Karl Rove, you’d think they could publish a letter from committee chairs. But they won’t do it. The reason they won’t do it is open to interpretation. But their refusal to correct the record is astonishing. Consider that they also received letters from Senator Feingold, Rep. Rush Holt, and over 100 individuals telling them that Joe Klein was in error.
To date, their only correction was to note that the Democrats have a different opinion than the Republicans over FISA. And that correction was not placed in their print edition. They refused to publish any letters to the editor on the issue.
Any print subscriber to Time has no way of knowing that Joe Klein published something 180 degrees away from the truth in last week’s edition.
Why is that?
