Dana Priest a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the Washington Post was the guest lecturer last night at an event sponsored by Northern Kentucky University's Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement.
Dana Priest is the lady who wrote the story disclosing that the CIA was operating secret prisons, called 'Black Sites', where those suspected of having knowledge of terrorism were being interrogated. Her story of course resulted in the liberal cry to end waterboarding and was the wind beneath the wings of Barack Obama's executive order closing Guantanamo Bay and other similar facilities.
The audience was populated with some of Northern Kentucky's liberal establishment. Though the hall was set for 300, it appeared to me that there were only about 50 in attendance. I was the only conservative.
After she gave her talk, telling everyone how she developed the sources for her story, and generally repeating the reasons why she was given the Pulitzer Prize by the very liberal Columbia University (where of course Ahmadinejad was invited to speak) she was kind enough to open the floor to questions.
And so I took that opportunity to ask her this question:
"The media watchdog group, Accuracy in Media, has equated you with Soviet apologist Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who covered up Stalin's crimes, pointing to your husband's connections with various Marxist groups and his long history of far left activism, and concluded that your story on Black Sites was a "carefully designed and planted effort to sabotage the war on terror" putting Americans at an increased risk of attack.
Under these circumstances, with all the stories you could have reported, how do you address those people who believe your motivations translate into media bias?"
And here was her answer:
I don't feel the need to address it necessarily because I have a long career and many articles that people can look at judging for themselves whether those articles turned out to be accurate or not. And I cannot think of a story in many years that I had to write a correction about....I am married to someone who is liberal with a think tank that has a liberal bent. You know, I don't feel the need to have to defend it, it is what it is.
And here is where I believe the liberal media dodges the question. Bias is not, as they would like it to be, limited to false reporting. Bias includes selective reporting.
In the middle of the war on terrorism, when our government was dealing with low life thugs, living in the shadows in far off lands, hell bent on executing secret plans to blow up shopping malls, schools and kill thousands of innocent people, why would you report a story designed to bring the CIA efforts to thwart those activities to a halt? Who cares if what you report is factually accurate or not, that's not the question, the question was of all the stories you could have written why pick one that had the potential, and in fact did deprive us of a meaningful tool to prevent the loss of innocent life?
Well, the answer she didn't want to give was revealed in the question. Here is who she is, and who her husband is and how the timing of the story was in FACT carefully designed and planted:
The Washington Post released the article at a point of maximum impact—the eve of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's crucial visit to America's European allies in the War on Terror. Priest's shocking claims did more than embarrass the administration; they harmed America's national security and intelligence gathering capabilities during a time of war.
Was political embarrassment for the Bush Administration her educated prediction or her deliberate intent?
Mary O. McCarthy, one of Priest's reported "anonymous" sources, has been outed as a Democratic partisan who worked closely with members of the Clinton Administration and the John Kerry Campaign foreign policy team, including Sandy Burger, Richard Clarke, Rand Beers and Joe Wilson.
As if that isn't enough to raise eyebrows, Dana Priest's matrimonial tie, not generally known to readers of the Washington Post, leaves a strong appearance of conflict of interest. As it happens, she is married to William Goodfellow, a far-left political activist and current executive director of the Center for International Policy (CIP), who has been at the vanguard of many of the most rabid attacks on Bush Administration policy.
Goodfellow has been described by his wife as a human rights activist. Yet, that is hardly an accurate or complete job description. For the past 30 years, William Goodfellow has pushed radical causes in a string of inter-related far-left think tanks.
In 1974, he wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the New York Times that served to excuse the genocidal Pol Pot's forced evacuation of the Cambodian people from the cities. The piece was so influential that it is still quoted by Noam Chomsky and his followers to this day. According to Goodfellow, the urban population of Phnom Penh was force marched to the killing fields because the Khmer Rouge believed that more food was available in rural areas—ignoring the evidence that the communist group was engaging in the systematic slaughter of the innocent, in order to create a communist society.
Goodfellow's CIP was created with the assistance of the Marxist Chilean diplomat and suspected Cuban spy Orlando Letelier, who was assassinated in Washington, D.C. Even after the truth about Letelier's Cuban Communist connections emerged in materials found after his death, Goodfellow continued to honor him.
While Goodfellow has remained with CIP since the seventies, he has also maintained a relationship with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, a notorious Marxist-oriented think tank). Throughout its history CIP has lobbied for the weakening of the U.S. military through unilateral nuclear disarmament measures and opposition to vital weapons systems, constraining U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities, and appeasement of Marxist regimes around the globe.
And for those with an eye toward understanding how her answer to my question DID NOT address how her motivations translate into media bias, take a look at this web of far left loons at the center of which is Dana Priest:
Priest's lecture at NKU was no doubt intended to bring a prize winning journalist to the area and to increase the standing of the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement funded in part by the Murry Seasongood trust. But if this state sponsored educational institution is sincerely interested in advancing the cause of journalistic integrity, it must do a better job of investigating its speakers.
The job of exposing the truth is never ending, and as Dana Priest herself admitted, that job is now being shared by bloggers in the new media, just like me.
The truth is that NKU quietly celebrated the accomplishments of a woman whose reporting received an award, but whose motivations deserved a layer of tar covered by feathers.
