BCT Editorial – 5/17/09

This page was last updated on May 17, 2009.

Power play; Editorial; Beaver County Times; May 17, 2009.

The editorial subtitle is “Congress and the courts must curb potential abuse of constitutional rights.”

This is at least the second editorial I recall telling us of evil things the Bush administration allegedly said it could do but didn’t. [I’m too lazy to search for the previous instance(s).] It must be a pretty slow day when you feel the need to bash someone for not doing something wrong.

It’s especially bad when you feel the need to embellish the status of your source.

The editorial told us “Philip Zelikow … was a legal adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.” Not so according to the “article he [Mr. Zelikow] wrote for the Internet site of Foreign Policy Magazine” cited by the editorial.

In that FP article, Mr. Zelikow wrote he was Ms. Rice’s “policy representative to the NSC Deputies Committee” and that “My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion.” Mr. Zelikow identifies Ms. Rice’s “Legal Adviser” as “John Bellinger” at the time.

Was the editorial’s misrepresentation of Mr. Zelikow as “a legal adviser” to Ms. Rice an intentional move to inflate his qualifications to provide a legal opinion? After all, the editorial accurately quoted another portion of the FP article.

On a different topic, now that President Obama has decided to reinstate military tribunals for terrorists after banning them, it will be interesting to see how the Times reacts. Will the Times duck the issue (as it did with the root cause of the recession), stick to its guns, or tell us how new and improved the Obama tribunals will be relative to those of President Bush?