The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Wow, He’s an Artist Too!
“Obama Paints Picture of GOP Adversaries”–headline, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 10
‘In a Related Matter’
New York Times reporter John Schwartz illustrates journalistic sleight-of-hand technique. Schwartz reports that the Obama administration is “pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration”:
In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries, where they say they were tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could threaten national security and relations with other nations.
Douglas Letter, the lawyer representing the government, asserted the same state doctrine on Monday, “startling several judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit” and ticking off the ACLU. But Letter said the position he was taking had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration.”
This, of course, is inconvenient for the Times, which spent years portraying the Bush administration as lawless and power-mad. So Schwartz concludes his story by . . . changing the subject:
In a related matter, Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday proposed the establishment of a “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees and other issues, like the firings of United States attorneys by the Justice Department. The commission, he said, could grant immunity to witnesses to explore the facts without the threat of criminal prosecution.
Now of course you could say anything is “a related matter”–a butterfly flaps its wings and all that. But in a related matter, MarketWatch reports that the New York Times Co.’s profits declined 48% in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier. Do you see our point?
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
