Extraordinary hubris

Only a few weeks before the election and the MSM appears to be pulling out all the stops. The latest in a series of Bush-bash stories comes from MSNBC:

Grey writes that it was this offhand comment by Goss that alerted him to the existence of the highly classified CIA program of “snatches and imprisonment that operates outside normal rules.”.

What you just read was a description of British reporter Stephen Grey, who somehow believes he stumbled onto the CIA's current 'rendition program' only because ex-director Porter Goss slipped up. How sinister. But he did no such thing.

Grey admits the existence of the rendition program prior to Bush, but claims the Bush folks made it extraordinarily worse after 9/11. The MSNBC writers seem to be admitting such as well, but claim the old program was far different than today's version. They try to poke holes in CIA spokesperson Jennifer Millerwise Dyke's reply to the Goss claim:

But the examples that Dyck cited in her response—as well as other public references to renditions prior to Goss’s comments to Grey—involved instances in which the practice was mentioned as a legal tool by which U.S. government agents in the FBI or the CIA apprehended suspects overseas and brought them back to the United States to stand trial in courts of law.

Their reply might be a little deceptive since it talks about the public perception of the former program, not the actual program. That the public was unaware of the true nature of the program back in the 90s can only be attributed to reporters who didn't dig very deep.

Enter ex-CIA bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer. He's been a hard guy to pin down politically of late, most recently angering the left by accusing Clinton of lying on Fox News Sunday when he bragged about trying to nail UBL. Scheuer was the inventor of the modern rendition program, however he claims his mid 90s proposal was somewhat different from what became reality:

Even more crucially, Scheuer’s rendition programme stated that snatched suspects would be taken to the US as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions. The Clinton administration, however, says Scheuer, forbade this, insisting instead on sending captives to whatever nation had tried them or had an outstanding warrant for them. “To give them PoW status would have given them credibility, in the eyes of the administration, and they didn’t want that,” Scheuer says.

Did you catch that?

In sum, it seems that Scheuer's program was molded by the Clintonites into a less-vigorous version of what we expanded after 9/11, but it was nevertheless the same. Terrorists were being flown around all over Europe and taken to countries that allow torture. Where is the outrage? I think you know the answer.

MORE 10/14/06

Speaking of legacy terrorists, CNN had a story Saturday about the Supermax prison at Florence, Colorado, home to our most notorious criminals. Apparently they're having a little morale problem with the guards out there.

But the curious part of the AP-written story was an ommission. They reminded us that Florence is the home of the Unabomber, Terry Nichols, and even Zacarious Moussaoui, but failed to mention it also housed the star of ABC's "Road to 9/11" movie, Ramzi Yousef. Moussaoui didn't even kill anyone, while Yousef almost knocked down the Twin Towers. As they say, hmm.