Seems The Washington Post is not just reporting but making news. Todd Zywicki at The Volock Conspiracy sums it up nicely:
The Washington Post’s Ombudsman Andrew Alexander dedicated his column this week to the Post’s puzzling silence on the DOJ’s dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case over the past several months. Alexander rebukes the Post for its failure to cover the story, but seemingly accepts the explanation of the paper’s reporters and editors at face value that this reflected resource constraints, not ideological bias: “National Editor Kevin Merida, who termed the controversy “significant,” said he wished The Post had written about it sooner. The delay was a result of limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat, he said.”
But this explanation won’t wash.
Consider this substantial, prominently-placed puff piece that ran just one month ago (June 4, 2010) on page A3 of the Post that is entirely dedicated to the activities of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division: “Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division steps up enforcement.” I recall sitting at the breakfast table reading that piece and being absolutely stunned at its sycophantic tone and–most astonishingly–at the failure to even mention the controversial dismissal of the New Black Panthers case. Not a single word.
I’m sorry, but Kevin Merida’s excuse simply does not add up. I simply cannot see how the Post could assign a reporter (Jerry Markon) to write a substantial story–which reads like a press release for the new DOJ Civil Rights Division–and claim that its failure to even mention the New Black Panthers case until last week was the result of “limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat.” And I think that Alexander’s uncritical whitewash of Merida’s excuse is, well, inexcusable.
Meanwhile, The Post did find time to unveil a massive report on the U.S. intelligence community. This naturally raised alarms, causing, for example, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which sent a memo to contractors warning them about the article. “Foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations and criminal elements will have potential interest in this kind of information. It is important that companies review their overall counterintelligence posture to ensure that it is appropriate.”
On the other hand, perhaps the newspaper is doing us a service in reporting that, "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
If this prevents our intelligence community from preventing another big one, then I'm concerned. Here are some highlights from the article:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.That's not good. Sounds as though a lot of dots aren't being connected.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
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