President Bush has summoned editors from the Washington Post and New York Times to the White House at least twice in recent months to request the paper’s hold stories. According to the Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, Bush first asked the Post’s executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. not to publish an article exposing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe. CIA Director Porter Goss and John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, also reportedly attended meetings with editors from the Post to discuss the story’s publication. The Post went ahead and published the story but did not reveal the locations of the prisons at the Bush administration’s request. President Bush also met with top officials at the Times on Dec. 5 to ask them not to reveal that the Bush administration had authorized eavesdropping on Americans within the United States without court orders. The Times had originally uncovered the story before the 2004 election but held it until two weeks ago.