Perhaps European investigators who are complaining of stonewalling by the US government in their investigation into the secret CIA detention centers and prisoner rendition should give ABC News and the Washington Post a call. Chances are, they know something they’re not telling. Have a look at this very interesting exchange between Brian Ross, Chief Investigative Correspondent for ABC News, and Ed Schultz provides wonderful insight into how the media will often apply self censorship to themselves:

ES: Do you wrangle with the responsibility as an American, as a journalist, about what line you cross and what information you use and don�??t use? I mean, are�??

BR: Absolutely we do. We do every day, on the stories. In the case of the secret prisons with the CIA, we know there were two in Europe, in Poland and Romania, we knew they had been shut-down and the prisoners all moved to a third location. The CIA objected to our reporting and, uh, the decision of our management, which I think was the correct one, was that we reported where they had been and were closed, we did not report where the prisoners were currently being held, although we think we had that pretty solid.

ES: Do you think, and this is an opinion answer, you can give it if you want to�??

BR: I�??m better on the facts, Ed, but go ahead.

ES: I know. Do you think that, uh, the media can hurt the country when it comes to intelligence issues? I mean, the administration has made the case that it�??s jeopardizing security.

BR: Well, I think our role is to report what we know. I mean, if I can find out, I don�??t think it�??s that big of a secret. I don�??t think we�??ve hurt the country by our reporting at ABC. I can imagine a hypothetical, an extreme one where we could. We would never report troop movements, we would never report anything that had to do with, uh, security arrangements. That�??s why we didn�??t report the current CIA prison location, because we thought that could be helpful, if they wanted to stage some kind of a jail break. But, again and again I think it�??s more important for your listeners, our listeners, our readers to know what�??s going on. These are questions that are worthy of debate.

(I still find it really amusing that this was in an interview about the scandal of the government snooping on journalists. I can just imagine it: “Hey, we played ball and shut our mouths, and now you’re snooping on us?!” I guess the friendship’s over. I’m sure if the administration had only asked them nicely they would have complied so as not to “hurt the country”).

At the time the original ABC story broke about the CIA prisons in Europe, Mr Dick Marty reported to the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights that:

On 5 December 2005 ABC reported, in turn, the existence of secret prisons in Poland and Romania that had apparently been closed following The Washington Post�??s revelations. According to ABC, eleven suspects detained in these centres were then transferred to CIA facilities in North Africa. They were allegedly submitted to the harshest interrogation techniques (so-called �??enhanced interrogation techniques�?�). I would point out that the ABC article confirming the use of secret detention camps in Poland and Romania by the CIA was available on the Internet for only a very short time before being withdrawn. This strikes me as a telling indication of the pressure put on the media in this affair (in this particular case, the pressure was apparently brought to bear direct by the CIA).

As I wrote earlier, The NY Times have done something similar before, as well as altered their reporting on the CIA prison scandal to be more favorable to the US government. This runs together with the Washington Post’s admission when it broke their story on the CIA prisons that they were “not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials”:

They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

Maybe the press are now annoyed just enough over the NSA scandal to loosen their tongues and help the European investigators. But hey, as allways, look on the bright side. The good news is that the US government and the CIA now find themselves in good company: Russia also has secret prisons in their War on Terror located in Chechnya “operated by Chechen officials and Russian security forces and are used to obtain information and confessions through beatings and torture, and for extrajudicial executions.”