AIM's Game of Semantics

[ck4829]

When you hear Accuracy in Media claim that its attacks on stories about the CIA's secret prisons are not a question of semantics, it's a question of semantics.

AIM has been on this for quite some time. As ConWebWatch has detailed, AIM's Cliff Kincaid has been targeting the Washington Post's Dana Priest since last November, when she first reported the existence of secret CIA-operated detention facilities for suspected terrorists in Europe, attacks that increased when Priest won the Pulitzer Prize in April for her reporting. Kincaid has asserted that her stories are "false," though he has offered little evidence to support that claim. Kincaid's main objection appears to be the lack of on-the-record sources to back up her reporting, though there has been little in the way of official denials of Priest's account of the secret prisons.

Kincaid has also objected to the use of the term "secret prisons" for no real apparent reason other than that it sounds harsh. When writing about it, he repeatedly puts the term in scare quotes.

Kincaid's attacks cranked up once again when President Bush, in announcing a proposed bill to create a military tribunal for terrorism suspects, acknowledged the existence of the prisons.

http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2006/aimsecret.html