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As Glenn Greenwald noted earlier this week in Salon:
Senior Washington Bush spokesman Fred Hiatt -- who also works as the Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post -- shatters conventional wisdom this morning by defending the Bush administration's mild, balanced, and restrained use of government secrecy. Government secrecy, you see, is a complex and serious issue -- we desperately need our leaders to act in secret, but they should try to balance that with a concern for civil liberties. And, decrees Hiatt, let us all be grateful that we have a Government that is so sensitive about this need for balance and is so fair and judicious in its use of secrecy privileges:
A PRESIDENT'S prerogative to protect national security secrets needs to be respected, but it should not unconditionally trump the rights of those harmed by the very programs the president means to shield from public view.
Such is the tension in several cases involving Bush administration antiterrorism policies, including the use of "extraordinary rendition" to seize terror suspects and most recently the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. In defending against court challenges, the administration has invoked the state secrets privilege, which evolved from a series of cases dating to the 1950s and which allows it to hold back material that it claims if released would compromise national security.
. . . . The Bush administration appears thus far to have used the privilege sparingly, at about the same rate as predecessors, according to a forthcoming law review article by Professor Robert M. Chesney of Wake Forest University School of Law.
Because the law review article which Hiatt cites is "forthcoming," neither I nor, presumably, most other people have yet seen it. But what I do know is that virtually all other long-available evidence -- which Hiatt studiously ignores -- demonstrates exactly the opposite.
* * *
Greenwald goes on to observe that the author of the law review article that serves as the basis of Hiatt's ludicrous assertions is himself basically nothing more than another neocon-artist apologist for BushCo.
So, the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that this "straight up" report on the NIE appeared in the Washington Post is that Hiatt is either on vacation, or else was out drinking more White House Kool-Aid when the decision to print this article was made.
