“Statements of Fact”

Fox News

New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse is defending comments she made during an appearance at Harvard last summer — when she said the U.S. government has abandoned the rule of law and is attacking women's rights. Greenhouse said the government is "creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world." She also talked about what she called a "sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism."

Now she tells Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post that those were "statements of fact." Greenhouse says the Supreme Court's rejection of the Bush administration's earlier policy on holding terror suspects without charges supports the things she said. She adds that the idea her comments were criticized by what she calls "self-appointed media watchdogs" means "American journalism is in danger of strangling in its own sanctimony."