Saturday, March 8, 2008 President Bush announced his veto of legislation that would have limited CIA interrogation techniques of captured enemies. A Line of Sight has written previously about the fallacy of codifying in law limits to our efforts to extract information from terrorists – something akin to announcing that a military intervention won’t include ground forces, as President Clinton erroneously did in Kosovo.

Within moments the Associated Press posted a story that was picked up all across the nation and world by the MSM (mainstream media) especially over the weekend when they are looking for wire service stories to paste between the pages of advertising of their weekend editions. In fact if you Google “AP: Reaction to Bush’s veto of Torture Bill” you get 238,000 hits.

The story gave reaction from eight different sources to the President’s veto. The second expert quoted was from CIA Director Michael Hayden who said that whatever Congress and the President pass, the CIA will “continue to operate within the law.” Since Hayden’s agency was to be directly impacted, a reaction from him seemed obligatory, and predictably he pledged to follow the rules.

The only other seven that the AP chose to list are as follows in order:

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
Anthony Romero – Executive Director of the ACLU
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)
Jennifer Daskal – Human Rights Watch attorney
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)

Four Democrat Senators and the San Francisco Democrat Speaker of the House plus representatives of two hard core leftist organizations… fair and balanced?

The story didn’t mention a single right-of-center organization or Republican elected official. It seems a reporter that was even the least bit interested in objectivity would want to include a statement from at least one token Republican – maybe somebody like John McCain, for example.

Digging really deep between the thousands of reprints of the AP story we managed to find out that McCain agreed and supported Bush’s veto. The San Francisco Chronicle cited comments through a spokesman of the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee saying McCain feels “it’s a good thing that (the CIA can use) enhanced interrogation techniques that are not revealed in your newspaper.” In other words, we shouldn’t be telling people who want to kill us what limits we will impose on ourselves to extract information about their plans.

Score it this way: Bush and McCain - 1
                               Mainstream Media - 0