Washington Post Returned Document Revealing NSA Program in 2004

The Washington Post claims not to have realized what they had, but it turns out that a Post reporter had in his hands in 2004 a classified Treasury Department document that included information derived from the extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

And they returned it to the government when threatened with prosecution.

A classified document that an Islamic charity says is evidence of illegal government eavesdropping on its phone calls and e-mails was provided in 2004 to a Washington Post reporter, who returned it when the FBI demanded it back a few months later.

According to a source familiar with the case, the document indicated that the National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations in the spring of 2004 between a director of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and lawyers for the foundation in the District...

Treasury Department officials inadvertently provided the classified document, which was marked "top secret" and dated May 24, 2004, to al-Haramain lawyers that same month, according to FBI correspondence with The Post. Treasury was investigating the foundation for possible links to terrorists and soon designated the group a terrorist organization.

At the same time, an attorney for al-Haramain, Wendell Belew, provided a copy of the document to Post reporter David B. Ottaway. Ottaway was researching Islamic groups and individuals who had been designated terrorists by the U.S. government and were attempting to prove their innocence.

In November 2004, FBI agents approached Belew, and soon thereafter Ottaway, saying that the government had mistakenly released the document. They demanded all copies back and warned that anyone who revealed its contents could be prosecuted...

"The FBI said that . . . it contained highly sensitive national security information," Ottaway said yesterday in a statement. "I returned it after consulting with Washington Post editors and lawyers, and concluding that it was not relevant to what I was working on at the time."

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Post, also declined to discuss the document but said it did not directly aid Ottaway's reporting.

"At the time we had this document, it was before we had any knowledge of the eavesdropping program. Without that knowledge, the document provided no useful information," Downie said. "At the time, all we knew was that this document was not relevant to David's reporting."

To give the Post the benefit of the doubt, they may have assumed that the NSA had a FISA warrant to intercept the conversations.

Treasury had, after all, provided the documents to the charity's defense team.

The best stories sometimes slip by without you knowing what you have.

However, anyone schooled with the dictum "there are no such things as coincidences" might have a hard time swallowing the Post's excuse.