WaPo goes on, great story, but refused to ID the Eastern European country in this article after a request from Bush administration officials.
What would YOU do? I am a journalist. I would name the country. I am NOT in the business of keeping the dirty secrets of the Bush administration's dirty war.
So I have a beef with WaPo on their call on that one.
More from WaPo:
The existence and locations of the facilities--referred to as ``black sites'' in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents--are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.
and WaPo knows more, but isn't telling: And this is where WaPo failed.
Would I publish that the allies are going to land in Normandy tomorrow if I got a leak on June 5, 1944? NO. But this is another matter. This is a secret, dirty war that Americans are paying for and should be aware of.
For WaPo to cave to administration pressure to withhold the name of the countries involved in this program is a disservice to readers in my opinion.
The Washington Post is now in the business, apparently, of keeping secrets of Bush's dirty war.
The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.
The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.
Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
``We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,'' said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. ``Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, `What are we going to do with them afterwards?'''
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
Look, I am an AMERICAN citizen. I don't mind if the government has LEGITIMATE secrets to keep, but I will NOT stand by and allow them to conduct this dirty war without challenging it every step of the way.
And yes, I may be only a small-time journalist at a secure, undisclosed location, but I say SHAME on the Washington Post editors for collaborating -- yes -- collaborating -- with Bush's dirty war.
We can perhaps expect an editorial apologizing for the Washington Post's behavior in a few years. Wish they would listen NOW.
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