Treason, Plagiarism and The Washington Post

Treason, Plagiarism and The Washington Post
Accuracy In Media

Winning a Pulitzer Prize for a story about CIA "secret prisons" has been quite lucrative for Dana Priest of the Washington Post. She now commands $15,000 - $20,000 a lecture ("only" $7,500 for a speech in the Washington, D.C. area, where she is based) and an official "fan site" has been established in her honor to promote her work.

But the article for which she won the prize not only damaged the security of the United States and endangered the safety of American citizens but appears to have been largely based on the work of London-based journalist Stephen Grey.

(snip)

The Post admits it was warned that publication of the Dana Priest story could disrupt or destroy a counterterrorism program absolutely essential to protecting America. And Grey admits being told by knowledgeable officials that the CIA program, which was begun by President Clinton but expanded by President Bush after 9/11, had been a huge success. It had apprehended suspected terrorists in various countries and had forced confessions of terrorist plots from Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the al-Qaeda leader who beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Today, however, a George Soros-funded legal group is challenging the program in court while the liberals who run the U.S. Congress are preparing to kill it legislatively and European Socialists are promoting a United Nations treaty to ban it.

The controversy over Priest's story has taken a new turn with the publication of an explosive new book, Shadow Warriors, which says that Grey "did all the spadework" and quotes him as saying that his original research "was kind of like a trade secret."

The book is by noted journalist Kenneth Timmerman, a correspondent for Newsmax.com. He says that Priest was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for "breaking" the story of secret prisons but he puts the word "breaking" in quotation marks, in order to make the point that she was not the first to disclose this kind of information.

It is Grey, Timmerman argues, who was behind not only the main disclosures in the Priest article but "provided key documents and information" to the New York Times and other media about secret CIA operations. Timmerman's book refers to Priest's "Unearned Pulitzer" and claims the real intention of Priest and other Post reporters was that of "smearing George W. Bush" and undermining his policies.

One of the main points of his provocative book is that journalists are being used by a network of current and former government officials, many from the CIA, to damage U.S. foreign policy. Timmerman names these officials in his book, calling them "weasels" whose actions bordered on treason.

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http://www.aim.org/aim_report/5953_0_4_0_C/