With both hands tied behind your back, now!

First of all the Globe & Mail should, yet again, be ashamed of itself. In this case, it's for putting up a headline that misleads the reader completely: Think tank's funding tied to getting good press.

Quick, what did that just bring to mind? Good press for the government, right? Sorry, but that's not what the article goes on to state:

A contract the Conservatives tabled in Parliament this week says the department considers the CDA's key goals to include the need "to consider the problems of National Defence" and "to support government efforts in placing these problems before the public."

The March, 2007, contract says the grant is part of a program to ensure an "independent voice for discussion and debate on security and defence issues outside of the academic sphere." It sets out 13 "expected results" for the CDA, including the requirements to:

"Attain a minimum of 29 media references to the CDA by national or regional journalists and reporters;"

"Attain the publication of a minimum of 15 opinion pieces (including op-eds and letters to the editor in national or regional publications)."

In other words, the CDA's performance standards - what they have to do to qualify for the $100,000 per year they get from DND - are about getting a fixed number of mentions in the mainstream media for defence issues. So, while the money is tied to "getting good press," the "good press" the headline must be referring to is "good press" for the CDA and defence issues, not for the government.

The CDA dutifully spells that out, but the rebuttal is buried well beyond where most readers stop:

Alain Pellerin, executive director of the CDA, says his organization has received money from National Defence for decades and the media quotas have been part of the agreement with the military since 2002, when a consulting firm told the department it should draw up more performance-based grant contracts.

He rejected the notion that the CDA is a mouthpiece for Ottawa. He said it has previously disagreed with the party in office, including during the 1990s when former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien's government slashed military spending, as well as when former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin decided against joining the U.S. missile shield plan.

In other words, most of the time the CDA has been operating, it has been under a Liberal, not a Conservative government, and it has received funding nonetheless. The performance-based contract was introduced under a Liberal government, not a Conservative one. And yet the Conservatives seem to be taking the hit for supposedly paying off defence mouthpieces. Talk about "The Anatomy of a Smear" - this one takes the cake.

But the government doesn't get off scot-free on this issue, if only because of their handling of it. The piece quotes Dawn Black of the NDP, and Steven Staples of the Rideau Institute - both of whose views I would characterize as anti-defence. And yet, when asked, the government stayed mum:

National Defence declined to answer questions on the contract. A spokeswoman said a five-hour window given to respond was insufficient, adding the department would need until today or next week.

I can guarantee you that's not because spokespeople for the department didn't have an answer or didn't want to answer. It's because they weren't authorized by those outside the department with a white-knuckle grip on the leashes to answer.

To the political-types stifling the process, please take a lesson from your military brethren: letting the press and the opposition get inside your decision-making cycle is a big tactical error. And yet you keep making it again, and again, and again...