The ability of tiny numbers of far-left fringe group demonstrators to get undue press attention virtually any time they want continues to be intensely annoying.
In mid-2007, Barack Obama made closing the prison at Guantanmo Bay a core promise of his 2008 campaign. That was 7-1/2 years ago. Obama has been in office six years. Gitmo is still open. So naturally, the aggrieved professional protesters at Code Pink organized a demonstration against Gitmo remaining active on yesterday's 13th anniversary of the prison's opening — at former Vice President Dick Cheney's house. They got far more ink and bandwidth than they deserved from the press, including Reuters — i.e., far more than nothing.
Reuters reporter Doina Chiacu also accommodated Obama by failing to note his original promise, framing it only as an end-of-administration "goal" (bolds are mine):
Two anti-torture protesters arrested at Dick Cheney's house
Two protesters were arrested at the McLean, Virginia, home of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday after 20 demonstrators, some in orange prison jumpsuits, walked onto his property to mark the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay prison.
The protesters from the anti-war group Code Pink walked up to the house before police arrived and asked them to leave, said Fairfax County police spokesman Roger Henriquez. Two members who refused to go were arrested on trespassing charges, he said.
... Another Code Pink group demonstrated without incident outside the home of CIA Director John Brennan, also in the Washington, D.C. suburb of McLean, as part of its "Guantanamo Anniversary Weekend Torturers Tour."
A U.S. Senate report last month said the CIA misled the White House and public about its torture of detainees after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and acted more brutally and pervasively than it acknowledged.
... Cheney has defended the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects in the aftermath of al Qaeda's hijacked plane attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York and Washington.
The prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was opened in January 2002 to house suspected militants and still holds 127 detainees, despite President Barack Obama's pledge to close the facility. Obama continues to face obstacles posed by Congress to the goal of emptying the prison before he leaves office, not least of which is a ban on transfer of prisoners to the U.S. mainland.
So it's Congress's fault. It couldn't possibly be that Obama's original 2008 campaign promise, which made him a darling of the fever-swamp left, was ill-advised and not thought through.
Other points:
- Gitmo was established in January 2002. That's 13 years ago, not 14. Subtraction is apparently not Donna Chiacu's strong suit. Her editor, Alan Crosby, failed to catch the error.
- Code Pink's pre-demonstration press release predicted a crowd of 30-60. Of course, Chiacu failed to note the group's failure to meet its already ridiculously small target.
- The group of demonstrators at Brennan's house was probably even smaller. I believe Chiacu would have told us if it had been larger.
I hope no one is waiting with bated breath for an outpouring of establishment press outrage over demonstrators showing up at their targets' homes, because it's not going to happen. That outrage is reserved only for those very rare occasions when pro-life or Tea Party-sympathetic demonstrators engage in that tactic. Both groups' national leaderships disapprove of the practice; Code Pink embraces it.
So fewer than two dozen demonstrators got national print attention from Reuters and the Hill, and video attention from MSNBC, which chose to call Code Pink "human rights activists." As shown yesterday, Code Pink is really a collection of "selective outrage activists."
None of these reports noted that despite years of left- and press-driven disinformation, two December polls — one by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, the other by ABC and the Washington Post — indicated that a majority of the American people still support the interrogation techniques used after the 9/11 attacks.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
