Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 16, 2006; 12:30 PM [...] Anonymous: How would you counter the argument of a distraught American citizen that the country of his birth has devolved into an empire in denial with little respect for the wisdom of our founding fathers, or the Constitution, in short, a military industrial rogue state with the self-declared right to emulate Pearl Harbor when and where it is unilaterally to our national interests?
Dana Priest: With a stiff drink?! A jog through Rock Creek Park? Is there something in the water today? I'm getting besieged with despairing notes such as this one. Maybe everyone should go outside (if you're in Washington at least), take a deep breath, smell the spring in the air, and then push the restart button and see what happens. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your analysis, only the tone, which is defeatist. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/10/DI2006021001326.html
Covert Intelligence
Dana Priest, the former City on the Hill editor who went on to uncover the CIA's secret prison scandal, comes back to Santa Cruz
By Bill Forman
Like many journalists, Dana Priest entered the field deeply imprinted with memories of investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein breaking open the Watergate scandal and bringing down a presidency. But in subsequent decades, the image of the political press has devolved from watchdog to lapdog. Spinmeisters control the flow of information and blackball the few journalists who ask the wrong questions.
Here in California, the outlook in recent years has been especially dismaying. Gary Webb, the maverick reporter who was laid off by the San Jose Mercury News after uncovering connections between the CIA and the crack cocaine trade, committed suicide the year before last. Meanwhile, at so-called town meetings, Arnold Schwarzenegger had taken to isolating the press in ever more confined holding pens, where they were permitted to serve as mute stenographers for scripted interactions between the governor and his carefully chosen audiences. Small wonder Dion Nissenbaum, one of the few Capitol reporters to do any actual investigation of Schwarzenegger, spent two years being denied any access to the governor before leaving to take a position as Knight-Ridder's bureau chief in Jerusalem.
In general, Washington hasn't fared much better. The president's press secretary routinely called on Jeff Gannon, a former prostitute posing as an Internet journalist, while steadfastly refusing to take questions from Helen Thomas, the most accomplished journalist in the Washington press corps. Gannon and his slightly more credentialed cyberpal Matt Drudge have, in a sense, become the contemporary face of political journalism, and it's not a pretty one.
Yet all is not lost. Dana Priest, the 1981 UCSC graduate who returns to town on March 6 to accept the Distinguished Social Sciences Alumni Award and give a lecture on "The CIA's Secret War," is an example of the kind of principled, no-nonsense investigative journalists who refuse to give up the fight. She covers national security for the Washington Post, where she recently received extensive recognition for breaking the story of the CIA's secret prisons ("CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons: Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11," Washington Post front page, Nov. 2, 2005). Priest is also a MacArthur Foundation fellow and an analyst for NBC.
In the following interview, Priest talks about her formative years in Santa Cruz; her view from the Washington Post newsroom on the day the Pentagon was bombed; the current controversy over the pending Dubai port deal; and Priest's investigations into the use of torture, secret prisons and other tactics that were once seen as antithetical to the American ideal.
METRO SANTA CRUZ: You started out at UCSC. Was there a journalism program here back then?
Dana Priest: No, I still to this day have not taken one journalism course. Let me tell you, you're not missing much.
Yeah, it became a thing to do after I got out of school. But at that time, City on the Hill was the blind leading the blind, truly; it was this group of students, mostly juniors and seniors, who did it all on their own in one building that I think is now the day-care center right at the entrance to the university. <more> http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/03.01.06/priest-0609.html