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Book excerpt: Gellman advances NSA story

By Mark Obbie

What with all of the books published on the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping -- see a good starting point on related posts here -- I would not have assumed there were many new stories to tell about the lawyers involved, and the events surrounding their drafting and debates. The Washington Post's Barton Gellman proved me wrong, in excerpts published starting today from his new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (Penguin Press). The book started as a Pulitzer-winning series in the paper by Gellman and Jo Becker. I haven't read the book yet or compared the series to what we now know about the events surrounding the administration's lawyering of the wiretapping program. But I believe Gellman breaks new ground, beyond his series and others' revelations, about the behind-the-scenes legal and human drama. Even though some of it is familiar, the narrative is compelling and instructive. True to the long-form narrative form of a book, source material is often disclosed in footnotes or endnotes. Sometimes newspaper or magazine excerpts from books ignore those fine points. Not this one. Kudos to the Post for publishing the endnotes with links  in the excerpt at the appropriate passages. That enables readers not only to judge the information's crediblity, but also whether it's truly new.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on September 14, 2008 (boomark / email).