The NYT off-leads its follow-up on yesterday's big WP story on the existence of a shadowy new military spy unit, which Sen. John McCain has announced he wants to investigate. The story's mostly a rehash, but the Times deserves credit for ignoring the artfully worded sentences in a Pentagon statement that appear to contradict the Post: "There is no unit that is directly reportable to the Secretary of Defense for clandestine operations as is described in the Washington Post," the statement claims, but later concedes, "
t is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its long-standing human intelligence capability." USAT nevertheless takes the bait: "PENTAGON DENIES REPORT OF NEW SPY UNIT.".....
......Even as the Bush administration tries to invoke (or, some might say, twist) the words of Bill Clinton and Daniel Patrick Moyinhan to support its partial privatization of Social Security, USAT fronts (and the WP and NYT mention) some breaks in the Republican phalanx. On the Sunday talk shows, Sen. Olympia Snowe and Rep. Bill Thomas both expressed some misgivings about Bush's focus on privatizing part of the system. "I don't think we want to erode the principles of that system," Snowe said, adding, " I'm certainly not going to support diverting $2 trillion from Social Security into creating personal savings accounts."...........
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112587/
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