Seditious Media: WaPo's GST Story

Anti-Bush = anti-Americanism = poor news judgment = dead Americans.

That's the formula that's playing out regularly in the troika of major anti-Bush newspapers -- the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. The NYT broke the NSA story, LAT the story-planting story, and today WaPo turns up a CIA expose.

WaPo's got pretty thin gruel here -- just the "umbrella" name of a number of covert operations, GST. There are no real revelations in the story, just that a lot of efforts are being coordinated under GST:

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

To hold such a non-story together, WaPo reporter Dana Priest spills beans. One example:

The presidential finding also permitted the CIA to create paramilitary teams to hunt and kill designated individuals anywhere in the world, according to a dozen current and former intelligence officials and congressional and executive branch sources.

Al Qaeda is well aware of these teams, but raising the specter of CIA assassinations domestically will likely result in efforts to curtail these necessary wartime activities. That is clearly WaPo's intent:

Time and again, the administration asked government lawyers to draw up new rules and reinterpret old ones to approve activities once banned or discouraged under the congressional reforms beginning in the 1970s, according to these officials and seven lawyers who once worked on these matters.

This is not presented as an heroic effort by lawyers to secure the tools needed to fight al Qaeda; it's painted as lawyers enabling Bush's obsessions.

MSM's hard work to curtail America's terror-fighting capabilities may have a very negative effect on those very efforts. Their incessant feeding of outrage to already ambitious lefty legislators may result in less aggressive terror-fighting by the CIA, which could lead directly to another attack on the homeland.

And if that happens, don't expect the boundaries to stay as confined. The CIA and other agencies will be granted more authority to fight the war, and WaPo's efforts will have been for naught -- but will have led to more American deaths.

Fortunately, as the article points out, we have President Bush:

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

Keep up the good work, Mr. President. Keep your eye on the ball, not the howling banshees in the stands.