Pull This Pulitzer

There has a been a great deal of controversy over this year’s Pulitzer winners.

I want to concentrate on Dana Priest’s, which reads:

Awarded to Dana Priest of The Washington Post for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret “black site” prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.

The core article that gained Ms. Priest her award, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” makes the following claims:

• “The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.”
• “The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.”
• “Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.”

Now, at the risk of being rude, Ms. Priest’s story, virtually 100% anonymously sourced, is at odds with this:

EU terror chief: ‘No evidence of CIA prisons’

There is no irrefutable evidence of secret CIA prisons in Europe the EU’s anti-terror coordinator has told MEPs.

Gijs de Vries told a special investigating European parliament committee that there is no proof government’s are or were complicit in illegal CIA activities.

“That evidence has not been established,” de Vries told MEPs on Thursday.

Appointed to coordinate Europe’s efforts against terrorism after the March 2004 attacks in Madrid, the Dutch politician also denied knowledge of any EU-US agreement permitting ‘extraordinary renditions.’

This contrasts with findings by the Council of Europe, last week the human rights watchdog said illegal renditions of terror suspects had taken place.

But on Thursday de Vries insisted the COE “has not yet concluded his investigations either so let us not jump to conclusions,” he said.

Ms. Priest’s report may yet prove to be accurate and perhaps worthy of a Pulitzer. Unlike other more controversial nominees, her writings appear to betray no specific government secrets, nor do they appear to put anyone in physical danger. (See update below; this statement may not be true based on Mary McCarthy’s arrest yesterday.)

But her piece has not been proven, and parts of it, based on the EU findings thus far, are clearly in doubt. She deserves no prize until the doubts are erased. Assuming she gets to keep her prize, it says more about the Pulitzer Committee’s political predelictions than it does about the accuracy of Priest’s work.

Of course, I’m still waiting for the Pulitzer Committee to pull the Pulitzer given to New York Times’ Walter Duranty in the 1930s as he whitewashed Stalin’s Soviet Union while ignoring its massacres of millions, including his infamously engineered famines. Until that occurs, every Pulitzer, no matter how otherwise richly deserved, is slightly tainted.
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UPDATE: Miss a day, miss a lot — Michelle Malkin reported late yesterday that arrested CIA agent Mary McCarthy had frequent contacts with McCarthy about the as-yet unproven prison system. Wow.

UPDATE 2: Sweetness & Light notes a “minor” conflict of interest on the part of Priest — “Dana Priest’s Husband Gets Joe Wilson Gigs.” Amazing: “Pulitzer Prize winning Dana Priest is married to William Goodfellow. William Goodfellow is the Executive Director of the the Center for International Policy (CIP). ….. So Dana Priest’s husband runs an operation that gets Joe Wilson speaking gigs. Don’t you just love our one party media?”