Glenn Greenwald
Monday February 19, 2007 11:19 EST
Unbearably, painfully, depressingly funny
The Washington Post's Dana Priest is one of the nation's most accomplished and (in my view) most impressive journalists. Last year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her superb work in uncovering and informing Americans about the Bush administration's network of Eastern European secret prisons -- CIA "black sites" at which detainees in U.S. custody are "interrogated" and held beyond the reach of the law or monitoring of any kind.
In a 2006 appearance on Meet the Press, Priest gave one of the most articulate and insightful defenses of the purpose of a free and adversarial press, and did so as she sat next to (and adeptly embarrassed) Bill Bennett, who was arguing that journalists like her and Jim Risen who expose the Leader's secrets should be imprisoned (an argument Bennett had made previously). And this interview Priest recently gave to PBS' Frontline (h/t E&P) is a genuinely compelling account of the true purposes of investigative reporting, of the unprecedented attempts to control information by the Bush administration, and of the severe flaws plaguing our nation's press corps.
Within the past few days, Priest (along with Post reporter Anne Hull) has published two separate, amply documented articles detailing the wretched conditions which the Bush administration has imposed on U.S. troops who are wounded in battle. Priest's articles powerfully demonstrate that those who exploit troops as a prop to shield themselves from criticism and justify a whole array of extremist policies could not, in fact, care any less for the welfare of the troops whom they exploit.
Today, in National Review's The Corner, Jonah Goldberg referenced the two Priest articles and said this:
I don't trust Dana Priest that much, and I am suspicious of some of possible motives behind the series, so with those caveats in mind, I still think the Post's series (See here and here ) on what some of our wounded troops go through is must-reading. Hospitals for vets returning from the front should be palaces and the last thing in the world any of them deserve are bureaucratic hassles. Though I should say that I've visited wounded troops and from my very limited experience they are surrounded by people who really do care. So Jonah thinks that Dana Priest is an unreliable source, does not "trust" her, and is "suspicious" of her motives. So what does he propose instead in order to get to the bottom of this, to find the real truth here? This:
Still, here's an idea for Fox News. Take Geraldo Rivera off the Anna Nicole beat and put him full time on this one. I'm not exactly a huge fan of Rivera's but he launched his career exposing the scandalous condition of mental hospitals if I recall, and he has just the right amount of preening self-righteousness (see Hurrican [sic] Katrina) to scare the bejeebers [sic] out of the relevant bureaucrats and politicians.That pretty much sums up what has happened to our country for the last six years. Evidence and information which reflects poorly on the Leader is suspect because it comes from the likes of Dana Priest, and things cannot be believed until Fox News' Geraldo Rivera -- currently on "the Anna Nicole beat" -- is able to look into things and tell us the real story.
-- Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
