Bennett Puffs Virtuously on Pulitizers

Think Again: What Some Call Treason, Others Call Truth - Center for American Progress:

"by Eric Alterman
April 20, 2006

Conservative blowhard and CNN talking head William Bennett gave America’s top newspaper reporters a backhanded compliment on Tuesday when he complained that three 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners were “worthy of jail.”

Bennett was venting over the fact that Dana Priest of the Washington Post and the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau employed classified data to expose administration malfeasance. (Priest broke the story of the CIA’s network of “secret prisons” in Europe, and Risen and Eric Lichtblau exposed the story of the NSA’s secret domestic wiretapping program—a subject Risen treated at length in his book 'State of War : The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration.) Even worse than employing classified data, Bennett said, was that these reporters had the temerity to publish their stories “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others, that they not release it. They not only released it, they publicized it—they put it on the front page, and it damaged us, it hurt us.”