Sunday, May 14, 2006

Dig Deeper !

When The Washington Post's Dana Priest won a Pulitzer for sharing classified information detailing strategies on the war on terror, the partisan CIA agent who spilled the beans was fired, instead of being hung for treason as she ought to. As honest debate ensues about the propriety of printing such information during wartime (as Ms. Priest held onto her Pulitzer and screamed, "Mine! All mine!"), it seems as if the Post is clarifying their position, by printing a front-page story claiming the CIA has been lying to Congress, all based on more dubious claims made by fired CIA agent Mary McCarthy:

A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere.
But another CIA officer -- the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was startled to hear what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar with her account. It came during the discussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA's interrogations


That CIA officer was Mary O. McCarthy, 61, who was fired on April 20 for allegedly sharing classified information with journalists, including Washington Post journalist Dana Priest...

McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted U.S. counterterrorism policy.

She "was not an ideologue"? What do you call someone who spills government secrets they are sworn to protect because they do not like the policies they represent?
Well, if you are a WaPost liberal, you call her a "patriot", I guess, but I would have less trouble with her credibility of she quit the CIA and then came out, as opposed to whispering secrets to a rabidly anti-Bush columnist while still collecting government paychecks.

The WaPost goes on with a whole laundry list of McCarthy's claims and complaints, but fails to note that the whole basis of her first set of leaks, and Ms. Priest's Pulitzer, was based on a story of secret prisons that is apparently completely false. The European Union, not the most American-friendly of international organizations, has repeatedly found no evidence of these so-called rendition flights and secret incarceration centers that Priest and McCarthy used to undermine America's policies abroad while obtaining glory and self-satisfaction for themselves.

Yet the Washington Post rolls on, dancing as fast as it can, using discredited sources to print even more unsubstantiated allegations, all in an attempt to bring down an administration voted into office twice by the American people. After all, their editorial board knows better than us common folk, right?

And as the final laugh, again in today's Washington Post, the paper that has brought us more agitprop lies and deception about the war on terror than any other media outlet in the world (including al-Jazeera and the NY Times), their so-called ombudsman wastes a whole column today talking about the right way to use the "corrections" section in cases of grammatical errors.

Unbelievable.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems like the media as a whole is launching a variety of trial balloons in the last few days on behalf of the Democratic party
-USA Today and the NSA "news"
-The NY Times' story regarding Cheney and wiretapping discussions in 2001
-Today's list of complaints by a disgrunted ex-agent in the Wa-Post

It is unconsciable for the media to act this way; there is not even a remote semblence of balance in their coverage of these types of stories;illegality is insinuated but never proven, and cost/benefit of mild survaillance during wartime is never discussed.

Blame too must be assigned to the Bush administration for not more aggresively countering these stories; they become fact by mere repetition by the media and talking heads. Leadership involves leading, and not allowing attacks to go undefended.

The media know this; they attack knowing their facts will be unquestioned by the administration. For that, Bush actually is to blame.

The probligo said...

Fascinating - obviously those who blindly support Bush have no fear of the men who might knock on their neighbour's door tonight...

The JerseyNut said...

yeah, yeah...for the last century or so people have been screaming that "facism is descending upon America"!
How come it always seems to land somewhere else; like Europe, or the Middle East, or the Far East?