Revealing Stories

More often than not, the most revealing stories about the White House don't come directly from the White House. They come from people who've had dealings with the White House.

Case in point, two stories over the weekend, one about the CIA's practice of rendition, and the other about the government response to Hurricane Katrina.

Dana Priest writes in Sunday's Washington Post about Khaled Masri, a German citizen wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA for five months, whose case "offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret."

And where did that pressure come from?

Priest's story focuses on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC. "J. Cofer Black, a professorial former spy who spent years chasing Osama bin Laden, was the CTC's director," Priest writes. "With a flair for melodrama, Black had earned special access to the White House after he briefed President Bush on the CIA's war plan for Afghanistan.

"Colleagues recall that he would return from the White House inspired and talking in missionary terms."

On another topic entirely, Spencer S. Hsu, Joby Warrick and Rob Stein write in today's Post about more stories emerging from a massive online document dump on the Louisiana governor's Web site .

Among the findings: "Shortly after noon on Aug. 31, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) delivered a message that stunned aides to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), who were frantically managing the catastrophe that began two days earlier when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

"White House senior adviser Karl Rove wanted it conveyed that he understood that Blanco was requesting that President Bush federalize the evacuation of New Orleans. . . .

"Thus began what one aide called a 'full-court press' to compel the first-term governor to yield control of her state National Guard -- a legal, political and personal campaign by White House staff that failed three days later when Blanco rejected the administration's terms, 10 minutes before Bush was to announce them in a Rose Garden news conference, the governor's aides said. . . .

"A Blanco aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the people around Bush were trying to maneuver the governor into an unnecessary change intended to make Bush look decisive.

" 'It was an overwhelming natural disaster. The federal government has an agency that exists for purposes of coming to the rescue of localities in a natural disaster, and that organization did not live up to what it was designed for or promised to,' the aide said. Referring to Bush aides, he said, 'It was time to recover from the fiasco, and take a win wherever you could, legitimate or not.'"