I for one don't want the editorial staff of the NYT deciding what should be not written about for national security reasons

    I look back at the decisions of the NYT to print the stories about the government using the SWIFT messaging system to track the laundering of the money that was used by Al Qaeda to purchase weapons used to kill our troops or the other instances where such as the info that the US was listening on the terrorists communicating by cell phone and think that the NYT had no business reporting either of these stories since patently the reporting resulted in the deaths of our troops and those of our allies.  Then I read this article and the responses to it and wonder if maybe I am really that out of sync with what the public think because of my having been the the classified document and message business and the preparation of intelligence documents and briefings when I was in the Army.

Deception and the C.I.A.

Re “An American in Pakistan” (Feb. 27):

Like many readers, I am dissatisfied with Arthur S. Brisbane’s defense of The Times’s active deception of its readership in the case of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security contractor in Pakistan. But even if I accept the necessity of such deceptions, I still feel that The Times is not doing all it can to preserve the trust we place in it.

In particular, if there is a continuing policy to query the State Department about covert matters and, if the government requests, to actively deceive readers to protect covert operations (even illegal ones), I would like to know precisely what the bounds of that policy are.

Do the editors request any proof that lives will be put at risk if they report on some matter, or do they accept the State Department’s word? What sort of evidence is sufficient, and what are the criteria by which the editors make the “hard calls,” as Dean Baquet put it? How long, as a matter of policy, is The Times willing to deceive its readers for the sake of national (or an individual’s) security? If the answer is something other than “as long as the State Department asks,” then what are the criteria The Times uses to decide how long to deceive its readers?

These are all important issues, and if The Times really does mean to deceive its readers as little as possible, there is no reason not to spell out explicit guidelines for these issues, articulated and published not by the public editor, but by the main editors who make such decisions. And after a situation has passed and the truth has been revealed, the manner in which the case qualified for temporary deception should be explained in full detail with direct citation from the relevant policy guidelines. There is no justification for not providing such explicit criteria.

Nicholas Beauchamp
Manhattan

•

I think your main point — that no story is worth a human life, that humanitarian concerns, as Bob Woodward said, trump journalism — is absolutely right. Newspapers frequently sit on stories that could endanger lives, sometimes at government request, sometimes on their own responsibility.

But I do wonder if that standard applies in the Davis case. The Pakistanis may not have known for sure that Mr. Davis worked with the C.I.A. but, as you say, they seem to have thought he did. Charges that he was involved with the C.I.A. seem to have been all over the Pakistani press. In other words, it was only American readers who were kept in the dark, and we’re not the ones who posed a threat to Mr. Davis’s life.

If the story was already all over Pakistan, why not do what Dean Baquet suggested was possible: report indications or reports of C.I.A. links, without government confirmation. This is something less than perfect, but would have kept Times articles from being as intentionally misleading as they were.

As you say, these are always brutally hard calls. But this time, perhaps The Times could have been a bit more journalistic and a bit less humanitarian, without putting the noose around Mr. Davis’s neck.

Richard C. Longworth
Chicago

•

I agree that The Times inevitably emerged from the handling of the Davis story as somewhat less Olympian than usual, but I would also point out that it really had it both ways. Most Times readers would have read the carefully worded paragraph that you cited from a Feb. 11 article as virtual proof of C.I.A. involvement. In describing the government’s statement about Mr. Davis’s assignment in Pakistan, the phrase “administrative and technical” carefully placed in quotation marks called attention to the newspaper’s doubt that it was truthful. So did the sentence “But his exact duties have not been explained, and the reason he was driving alone with a Glock handgun ...”

If The Times was concealing what it knew, as it was, it was doing so only barely. The minute I read the paragraph, I knew what was up.

James K. Sunshine
Oberlin, Ohio

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/thepubliceditor. The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.