Posted by Tina
The media hoopla over the non-story of outing Valerie Plame and the susequent headhunting scheme that resulted in Scooter Libbys outrageous conviction is made even more conspicuous today by the following story brought to us via NewsBusters.
New York Times Outs CIA Operative, by Mick Wright
In an astonishing stroke of irony, the New York Times has outed the name of the CIA operative who interrogated 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, over the objections of CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and a lawyer representing the operative. ** Agency officials and legal counsel told the Times that publishing the agent’s name would “invade his privacy and put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency.” ** In an Editor’s Note linked from the story on KSM’s interrogation, the Times defended its decision by stating that “other government employees” had been “named publicly in books and published articles” or had chosen to go public themselves, by explaining that its policy “is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely,” and by arguing the operative’s name “was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.” ** this is just the latest in a long string of Times articles that have leaked classified and guarded information critical to America’s security and that of its people and public servants. Alert readers have long since stopped expecting any level of consistency from the same liberal media that was obsessed with the naming of Valerie Plame (though they’ve been considerably less obsessed with the actual source of Robert Novak’s column, Richard Armitage).
The NewsBusters article provides links to the “editors note” and “KSMs interrogation” for those who are interested.
The cost of gasoline has also become a sore point in the U.S. presidential race, with President Bush and Republican candidate John McCain calling for lifting of a long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling to increase domestic oil production. But Democratic candidate Barack Obama has said such steps will do nothing in the short term to ease American consumer’s pain.