Misreporting the News, Again

The AP is not the mouth of the Democratic Party, it's simply the workplace of Liberal Democrats. Power Line has a great example, using the President's speech about the intelligence gathered from captured terrorists, ignoring the substance and leading with the headline:

"Bush Acknowledges Secret CIA Prisons." The AP's account begins:

President Bush on Wednesday acknowledged previously secret CIA prisons around the world and said 14 high-value terrorism suspects — including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks — have been transferred from the system to Guantanamo Bay for trials.

This is an absurd lede. President Bush said that a small number of high-value detainees "have been held and questioned outside the United States." This is not exactly a news flash. We knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed et al. were not at Guantanamo, and no one ever imagined that they were inside the U.S. The fact that this handful of top-level terrorists was being held by the CIA, somewhere outside the U.S., has been known and widely reported for years. President Bush declined to add anything to what has already been reported many times:

Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country.

So the AP's headline and lead paragraph, suggesting that the President made some sort of guilty admission, are misleading at best. The President's endorsement of the CIA's program was aggressive and effective, but few Americans will learn about it beyond the handful who watched the speech as it was delivered.