Reporting From Another Planet

I see Dana Priest is casting herself as some kind of detached third party, as expressed in Howard Kurtz's column today about her Nov. 2 story exposing a secret CIA prisoner detention program:

Says Priest: "My overall goal is to describe how the government is fighting the war on terror, and that gets you right to the CIA. This is a tactic. People can read it and decide whether that's good or bad."

This is unacceptable. Priest is a citizen of the United States, not a neutral observer from the planet Zorac. She has taken sides in a policy dispute, having decided either that this classified program isn't generating valuable intelligence or that protecting our country from terrorist attack is less important than human rights violations that may be attached to it. There might be something admirable about her actions if she owned up to them. Instead, she strikes the pose--I just happened to find this fact lying around; do with it what you will.