The four-column headline over the lead, front-page news article in today's New York Times says, "Bush Approves Covert Aid for Taliban Foes." The article begins, "President Bush has approved a secret effort to strengthen a diverse array of groups opposing the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, administration officials said today."
This language brought a chuckle from the editor of Smartertimes.com as he picked up his paper this morning. If administration officials are telling the New York Times about the plan and the Times is reporting it on the top of the front page under a four-column headline, the aid is neither "secret" nor "covert," at least according to the dictionary definitions of those terms.
Granted, the very public debates of the 1980s over "covert" funding for the Afghan rebels and the Contras had already eroded the meaning of the word "covert." But the Times would have been more accurate this morning simply to note that the aid program has not been formally announced to the American public or at a public session of Congress. Calling it "secret" and "covert" when it is neither has a whiff of hype about it, at the expense of accuracy.
The same Times article this morning reports that America "has shrouded the effort in secrecy to avoid giving the impression that Washington alone is determining the future of Afghanistan." This sentence, too, seems laden with contradictions in the context of the rest of the story. How can the effort be "shrouded in secrecy" if administration officials are telling the New York Times about it? If the administration is indeed so eager to avoid giving the impression that it alone is determining the future of Afghanistan, then telling the New York Times about the "secret" plan and then explaining to the Times that the reason the plan is "secret" is that the administration wants to avoid looking like it is calling the shots in Afghanistan seems too clever by three-quarters.
For a reader trying to figure out what the Bush administration's policy is and what to think of it, the Times dispatch is less than helpful. One possibility is that the administration really was trying to run a secret, covert program but simply lacked the internal discipline to avoid talking to the press about it. The leak, in other words, was accidental and not calculated. Another possibility was that the leak was calculated and authorized, and that the aid program is not in fact intended to be "secret" and "covert" at all. The Times news article leaves this matter entirely opaque. It's really hard for a reader to tell if the Bush administration is just monstrously bad at keeping secrets in wartime, or if the Times is being used as a megaphone to announce an aid program that was never really intended to be secret or covert, but that the Bush administration is pretending it was trying to keep secret because of a misguided fear of anti-imperialist backlash.