The Gray Lady Waited Three Years to Quote People Calling Torture Torture

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In this post, I described the Harvard study that showed that US’ largest newspapers stopped calling waterboarding torture once it became clear the US was doing it.I wanted to look more closely at an odd time lapse in the NYT’s Orwellian treatment of waterboarding.

In a seeming defense of their refusal to call torture torture given to Michael Calderone, the NYT admitted they had responded to pressure from the Administration, but claimed that they balanced that by admitting that others consider it torture–classic “on the one side, on the other side cowardice.”

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.” [my emphasis]

But if they were doing so, you’d think they’d be giving voice to people actually calling waterboarding torture.

At least according to the study, that’s not what they did at first. Not until 2007 did the NYT regularly (45.5% of the time) start quoting people calling waterboarding torture.

Except for a brief spate of articles in 1902‐1903 in the NY Times which quoted mostly military officials and senators, almost all of the articles that quote others calling it torture appeared in 2007 and 2008.

[snip]

Before 2007, the NY Times had only scattered articles quoting others. However, beginning in 2007, there is a marked increase in articles quoting others, primarily human rights groups and lawmakers. Human rights representatives predominate during the first half of the year. However, beginning in October, politicians were cited more frequently labeling waterboarding torture. Senator John McCain is the most common source, but other lawmakers also begin to be cited. By 2008, the articles’ references are more general such as “by many,” or “many legal authorities.” Stronger phrases such as “most of the civilized world” also begin to appear.

In other words, NYT’s “defense” of its actions appears to ignore a three year period during which they didn’t call torture torture, but during which they offered no counterbalance correcting that spin (which among other things means we can add it to the list of things–warrantless wiretapping, the leak of Plame’s identity Judy Miller received from OVP, and now calling torture torture–that the NYT did in the lead up to the 2004 election).

Which is all the more troubling given that NYT claimed they were watching their spin closely. One of the first NYT articles to report on waterboarding included this paragraph.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States.

As they pointed out in response to this study, FAIR immediately pounced on the Orwellianism.

The New York Times, revealing the interrogation techniques the CIA is using against Al-Qaeda suspects, seemed unable to find a source who would call torture by its proper name.

[snip]

The article took pains to explain why, according to U.S. officials, such techniques do not constitute torture: “Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees.”

The article seemed to accept that the techniques described are something other than torture: “The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury.” The implication is that only interrogation methods that cause serious physical harm would be real and not simulated torture.

The article quoted no one who said that the CIA methods described were, in fact, torture. Yet it would have been easy to find human rights experts who would describe them as such. The website of Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) reports that “the prohibition against torture under international law applies to many measures,” including “near drowning through submersion in water.” Amnesty International U.S.A. (www.amnestyusa.org) names “submersion into water almost to the point of suffocation” as a form of torture, and emphasizes that torture “can be psychological, including threats, deceit, humiliation, insults, sleep deprivation, blindfolding, isolation, mock executions…and the withholding of medication or personal items.”

[snip]

If the Times had included independent human rights or international law experts in the article, this information could have been available to readers.

[snip]

In fact, the Times might have looked back to its own archives on the subject to find critics of U.S. detention policies. Some of the information included in the May 13, 2004 article was first reported on March 9, 2003— except the original story quoted Holly Burkhalter of Physicians for Human Rights, who decried the lack of a “specific policy that eschews torture.”

In response to that and a bunch of complaints about the NYT’s coverage of Abu Ghraib, NYT ombud replied,

The specific issue is the use of “abuse” rather than “torture” to describe certain actions of American military personnel, intelligence officers, and private subcontractors. I asked assistant managing editors Craig Whitney and Allan M. Siegal for comment as they are, respectively, in charge of the news desk (where front page headlines get written) and all matters of language and style. Both were surprised when I raised the issue; both noted some substantive definitional distinctions between “abuse” and “torture”; both asserted that there is no Times policy one way or another; and both acknowledged that readers may be right.

Wrote Whitney in an e-mail message, “Now that you tell me people are reading things into our not using ‘torture’ in headlines, I’ll pay closer attention.”

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Torture and Truth

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Yesterday, I posted on a Harvard study showing that the press, after an established tradition of referring to waterboarding as torture, stopped doing so once it became clear the US engaged in the practice. Our press, in other words, refused to tell what they had previously presented as “the truth” (that is, that waterboarding was unquestionably torture) when it became politically contentious to do so.

Now I want to focus on one detail of the documents Craig Murray released yesterday in anticipation of the British inquiry into whether it was complicit with torture. The Brits are debating among themselves whether the question will be, “Did the UK order up torture?” or “Did the UK knowingly use information gathered using torture?” (Rather, the powers that be are trying hard to limit the inquiry to the former question.) So Murray posted a series of British Foreign Office communication set off when he asked both whether it was legal to receive information known to have been collected using torture, and what civil servants and Ministers thought about receiving information gathered using torture.

I would be grateful for the opinion of Sir Michael Wood on the legality in both international and UK domestic law of receiving material there are reasonable grounds to suspect was obtained under torture, and the position of both Ministers and civil servants in this regard.

That is, is it legal and is it the accepted practice of the government to accept information gathered using torture (ironically, at almost exactly the same moment, Jane Harman, having been assured that torture was legal by CIA General Counsel Scott Muller, was asking him whether it was the formal Bush policy).

The answers to those questions, as you can see by reading the thread of communication, were “yes” and “yes.” It’s the latter “yes” that the Brits don’t want to admit publicly in their inquiry.

That’s all politics. But what I’m most interested in is a paragraph Linda Duffield, the Director, Wider Europe, wrote on March 10, 2003, memorializing a meeting between her, Murray, and two others. In it, she describes explaining to Murray that she appreciated his concern about information collected using torture, but that the “moral issues” raised by it had to be weighed against other moral concerns. And the competing “moral” issue–as she lays out–is the necessity to “piec[e] together intelligence material from different sources in the global fight against terrorism.”

I said that he was right to raise with you and Ministers (Jack Straw) his concerns about important legal and moral issues. We took these very seriously and gave a great deal of thought to such issues ourselves. There were difficult ethical and moral issues involved and at times difficult judgements [sic] had to be made weighing one clutch of “moral issues” against another. It was not always easy for people in post (embassies) to see and appreciate the broader picture, eg piecing together intelligence material from different sources in the global fight against terrorism. But that did not mean we took their concerns any less lightly. [my emphasis]

Duffield is claiming to acknowledge the moral problems of torture, but suggests that the “moral” (and ethical) necessity to piece together intelligence on terrorism–not to keep the country safe, but to piece together intelligence–balances out those moral problems.

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Waterboarding Is Only Torture If John McCain Says So

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Time for another blogger ethics panel. Or maybe just a bloggers’ style guide, one that states unequivocally that waterboarding is torture. Because–as Glenn reported earlier–the dead tree press only calls waterboarding torture when others do it. And they stopped referring to it as torture as soon as it became clear it had become US policy.

The results of this study demonstrate that there was a sudden, significant, shift in major print media’s treatment of waterboarding at the beginning of the 21st century. The media’s modern coverage of waterboarding did not begin in earnest until 2004, when the first stories about abuses at Abu Ghraib were released. After this point, articles most often used words such as “harsh” or “coercive” to describe waterboarding or simply gave the practice no treatment, rather than labeling it torture as they had done for the previous seven decades.

One of the most telling details from the study is the description of how newspapers admitted that waterboarding is torture without their omniscient editorial voice describing it as such: they quoted other people.

All four papers frequently balanced their use of softer treatment by quoting others calling waterboarding torture. Except for a brief spate of articles in 1902‐1903 in the NY Times which quoted mostly military officials and senators, almost all of the articles that quote others calling it torture appeared in 2007 and 2008.

More telling still, newspapers barely began to do that until 2007, three years after they started talking about torture, and they most often relied on John McCain to state what–before it became clear the US engaged in such torture–their own pages had stated fairly consistently beforehand.

When quoting others who call waterboarding torture, there is a shift in who the LA Times and the NY Times quoted over time.

Before 2007, the NY Times had only scattered articles quoting others. However, beginning in 2007, there is a marked increase in articles quoting others, primarily human rights groups and lawmakers. Human rights representatives predominate during the first half of the year. However, beginning in October, politicians were cited more frequently labeling waterboarding torture. Senator John McCain is the most common source, but other lawmakers also begin to be cited. By 2008, the articles’ references are more general such as “by many,” or “many legal authorities.” Stronger phrases such as “most of the civilized world” also begin to appear.

The dead tree press, apparently, couldn’t find an expert they believed could adequately voice the long-standing consensus that waterboarding is torture–a consensus recorded in their own pages (at least those of LAT and NYT)–until after McCain started speaking out on the topic.

One more point. The study only examined the four papers with the greatest circulation: NYT, LAT (both of which had extensive archives the study measured for previous uses of torture), USA Today, and WSJ (which didn’t have the same range of archives). So it did not include the WaPo in its study–the paper notorious for torture apology from both the newsroom and Fred Hiatt’s editorial page. So the numbers could be even worse!

What a remarkable measure of the cowardice of our press. And what a remarkable measure of how it happened that torture became acceptable. It’s not just that the press failed in their job, but it’s clear that’s a big part of it.

The WaPo’s Very Funny Idea of Source Protection

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So on the same day that WaPo accepted Dave Weigel’s resignation for the unauthorized publication of emails that were off the record, it also published an article relying on anonymous sources–with no discussion of whether these sources have a motive for their comments–claiming Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings violated journalistic rules by publishing comments that were off the record. Mind you, the article itself supports the conclusion that the Bud Lite Lime imbibing blabbermouths just assumed their comments were off the record but never asked for them to be, particularly given the several other comments which they explicitly asked to be treated as off the record.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about the WaPo’s funny treatment of sources today.

In addition to the article beating up on the Rolling Stone for what appear to be unsubstantiated anonymous charges, they also post the entirety of a fact-checking exchange between an editor at Rolling Stone and Duncan Boothby, the McChrystal press aide who was fired after the article came out. And that exchange gives a fairly detailed description of who the Bud Lite Lime-imbibing blabbermouths were.

2.) Are the following people on McChrystal’s staff, and, are these titles correct:

a. Col. Charlie Flynn, McChrystal,s chief of staff — NO,CHARLIE IS HIS ‘XO’ OR EXECUTIVE OFFICER

b. Brig. Gen. Bill Mayville, McChrystal,s chief of operations–NO, MAJOR GENERAL, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF, OPERATIONS

c. Gen. Mike Flynn, McChrystal,s second-in-command — NO, MAJOR GENERAL, DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE

3.) The reporter doesn,t name the following people, but he does give a list of vague descriptions for other people on McChrystal’s team. Can the following be found on McChrystal’s team: FINE, NO NAMES PREFERED

a. A Navy SEAL (TWO NAVY SEALS)

b. A British Special Forces officer (NO – NOT ON HIS TEAM, BUT THE FORMER HEAD OF BRITISH SPECIAL FORCES, THE SPECIAL AIR SERVICE (RETIRED) IS ON HIS TEAM)

c. An Afghan Special Forces commando (YES WHO IS HIS AIDE DE CAMP)

d. A lawyer (SPECIAL FORCES LAWYER)

e. Two fighter pilots (YUP)

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The Sartorial Splendor of NYTimes Professionals (MoDo) at Work

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As you may recall, Jim Risen of the New York Times recently caught a little flack for producing a rather un-Risen like article in the Times on the “suddenly discovered” Afghanistan mineral mother lode. When a few astute souls, led by several in the main media, mused that it seemed an odd story coming from Risen’s pen, Risen went a tad apoplectic.

I respect Risen; seems to be a decent chap so, like Marcy, I kind of internally cut him some slack and blew it off even though the story was curious and the mineral deposits were long known. Cest la vie. Until Risen decided to lash out with an unnecessary, undeserved and mean spirited frontal assault on bloggers:

In an interview with Yahoo! News, Risen dismissed suspicions that the story was part of an orchestrated campaign to rescue the troubled American effort there and derided critical bloggers as pajama-clad layabouts with no reporting chops.

Aw Jim, why did ya go and do that? Because now I have to point out what kind of sophisticated high fashion threads the high and mighty stars of the New York Times, Risen’s home, wear when covering the biggest and most important stories of our age. In the august and serious halls of United States District Court.

You see, Marcy and I had the privilege of covering closing arguments in United States Federal Court in San Francisco on the groundbreaking Perry v. Schwarzenegger case. As luck would have it, so too one of the tenured star of stars from the New York Times was present with us covering the critical closing arguments. None other than the high doyenne herself, Maureen Dowd! Exciting!

But while I, a lowly blogger, was clad in a Brooks Brothers suit, Canali tie and well polished Cole Haans, the star representative from the venerable Gray Lady New York Times, home of uptight sartorial snobs like Jim Risen, came dressed quite in a different and interesting fashion. Take a look and judge for yourself whether the haughty boys and girls at the New York Times ought to be blowing dung out their posteriors at other reporters over fashion sense and choice. Go ahead clotheshorses of the Gray Lady, make my day.

The traditional prize awarded for outstanding commentary, the cherished Emptywheel hubcap, will be bestowed to the most creative caption for this precious photo. Let the contest begin!

Obama Administration Defends Stupid Counterterrorism Decisions, Again

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Only this time, those decisions were made by his own Administration:

The Department of Defense said Monday it acted correctly when it barred three journalists, including Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, from covering military hearings at Guantánamo Bay.

But it left open the door to reinstating the reporters.

David A. Schulz, the attorney representing Rosenberg and reporters from Canwest News Service and the Toronto Star, had asked for a reversal of the coverage ban. The exclusion also affects a fourth reporter from The Globe and Mail who appealed independently.

“It is my determination that officials of the Department were correct to take the actions they did against these three individuals,” Bryan G. Whitman, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, wrote Monday in a letter to Schulz.

The stupid counterterrorism decision, of course, was to ban four journalists–including one who wrote a book on Omar Khadr and another with by far the most expertise on Gitmo–because they published the name of Joshua Claus. The seem to think people are too dumb to discover this stuff on their own. And it appears they’d like to avoid admitting that a guy who was convicted in relation to the death of Dilawar also implicitly threatened rape and death with Khadr. As a result, one of those acts which would, if done correctly, win some credibility with those we’re trying to persuade, is instead made out to be a kangaroo court where reporters are asked to purge their mind of all relevant knowledge when they walk in the trial room.

[Hi there Wheelheads, bmaz here – I am about to board the plane and Marcy is already in the air. We are going to San Francisco to cover closing arguments in the Prop 8 Gay Marriage case. You all behave, and keep the joint tidy. If there is WiFi in the plane I will post from there. Otherwise hoop it up and don’t completely drain the liquor cabinet]

NYT, Republican Opposition Rag

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Clark Hoyt has a really curious final column summarizing his three years as the NYT’s public editor. A lot of it is self-congratulation to the NYT for even having a public editor. But I’m most fascinated by Hoyt’s rebuttal of reader claims that NYT is a “liberal rag.”

For all of my three years, I heard versions of Kevin Keller’s accusation: The Times is a “liberal rag,” pursuing a partisan agenda in its news columns.

[snip]

But if The Times were really the Fox News of the left, how could you explain the investigative reporting that brought down Eliot Spitzer, New York’s Democratic governor;derailed the election campaign of his Democratic successor, David Paterson; got Charles Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in ethics trouble; and exposed the falsehoods that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another Democrat, was telling about his service record in the Vietnam era?

Hoyt names the Spitzer scandal, certain Paterson allegations, coverage of the Rangel scandal, and its recent Blumenthal attack as proof that the NYT is not a liberal rag.

With the exception of the Rangel coverage, these are all stories for which the source of the story is as much the issue as the story itself. Hoyt must hope we forget, for example, that Linda McMahon (Blumenthal’s opponent) boasted she fed the Blumenthal story to the NYT. Their denials that she had done so became even more unconvincing when the AP reported that the NYT hadn’t posted the full video, which undermined the NYT story.

I have no idea where the Rangel story came from (and in this case, I don’t care, because it’s clearly an important story about real abuse of power).

Then there’s Paterson. With this story, too, there’s a dispute about the NYT’s sources. Paterson says he was the NYT’s original source (they deny that too, and it’s true that this one is more likely to have been a Cuomo hit job). In any case, the NYT story fell far short of the bombshell that was promised for weeks leading up to it. Another political hit job that maybe wasn’t the story it was made out to be.

Which brings us to Eliot Spitzer. There are a number of possible sources the NYT might have relied on, starting with right wing ratfucker Roger Stone, who has bragged about being involved in that take-down. But they all, almost by definition, come down to leaks from inside a politicized DOJ. And those leaks focused not on any of the other elite Johns involved, not on the prostitution ring itself (which was, after all, exceptional only for its price tag), but on Spitzer. While I agree that Spitzer’s hypocrisy invited such a take-down, there wasn’t much legal news there, no matter how hard the press tried to invent it to justify the coverage.

But the list doesn’t end there. Elsewhere in Hoyt’s goodbye, he mentions his biggest regret–the Vicki Iseman story.

But throughout my tenure, Keller was gracious and supportive. When we had what was certainly our disagreement of greatest consequence — over the Times article suggesting that John McCain had had an extramarital affair with a young female lobbyist — Keller showed great equanimity. I said The Times had been off base. Though the story gave ammunition to critics who said the paper was biased, and it was no help to have the public editor joining thousands of readers questioning his judgment about it, Keller said mildly that we would just have to disagree on this one.

Say what you will about whether this was a worthwhile story, one with the wrong emphasis, or inappropriate scandal-mongering, it is pretty clear the Iseman part of the story came from disgruntled former Republican aides to McCain, probably in the neighborhood of John Weaver. Thus, it fits into this larger list of stories that serve not so much as proof of NYT fair-mindedness, but of its willingness to regurgitate oppo research in the service of powerful–often Republican–political opponents.

Then, finally, there’s the story that Hoyt doesn’t mention, to his significant discredit–the ACORN Pimp Hoax. Read more →

The Blind Leading the Blind

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The WaPo is scouring the business world looking for the perfect talent to lead the failing company. Today, they announced they’ve hired the guy who drovem GM into the ditch to its board.

Rick Wagoner, who was fired as chief executive of General Motors by the White House, has been elected to The Washington Post Co.’s board of directors, increasing the board to 11 members, the education and media company said today.

The Post Co.’s release says that Wagoner “retired from General Motors Corporation in August 2009,” but the White House acknowledged that it forced Wagoner to step down two months before the struggling automaker was forced to declare bankruptcy, following a $51 billion government bailout. As part of the bankruptcy, the federal government took a 61 percent stake in GM, which it still holds. GM plans an IPO in coming months to pay back the taxpayer money.

Because just about the only people with more expertise in dying industries than news executives are automotive ones.

Teddy wants to know, though, whether this makes Newsweek Pontiac.

Once Again, Obama Empowers State Department to Lecture Others

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Almost a year ago, Obama celebrated the anniversary of the Convention against Torture by promising to have the Department of State look at other countries’ use of torture.

My administration is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims. On my third day in office, I issued an executive order that prohibits torture by the United States. My budget request for fiscal year 2010 includes continued support for international and domestic groups working to rehabilitate torture victims.

The United States will continue to cooperate with governments and civil society organizations throughout the international community in the fight to end torture. To this end, I have requested today that the Department of State solicit information from all of our diplomatic missions around the world about effective policies and programs for stopping torture and assisting its victims so that we and our civil society partners can learn from what others have done. I applaud the courage, compassion and commitment of the many people and organizations doing this vitally important work. [my emphasis]

And while the specific requirements of the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act mandate action from the Department of State, it still feels pretty hollow when, less than two weeks after DOD banned four reporters from Gitmo for printing information that’s in the public domain, Obama is again directing the State Department to lecture others about issues the US has problems with itself.

Here’s what transpired when Obama signed the Act:

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, hello, everybody.  I am very proud to be able to sign the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, a piece of legislation that sends a strong signal about our core values when it comes to the freedom of the press.All around the world there are enormously courageous journalists and bloggers who, at great risk to themselves, are trying to shine a light on the critical issues that the people of their country face; who are the frontlines against tyranny and oppression.  And obviously the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.

What this act does is it sends a strong message from the United States government and from the State Department that we are paying attention to how other governments are operating when it comes to the press.  It has the State Department each year chronicling how press freedom is operating as one component of our human rights assessment, but it also looks at countries that are — governments that are specifically condoning or facilitating this kind of press repression, singles them out and subjects them to the gaze of world opinion in ways that I think are extraordinarily important.

Oftentimes without this kind of attention, countries and governments feel that they can operate against the press with impunity.  And we want to send a message that they can’t.

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Rahm and Axe: Timmeh Has Got His Groove Back

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What a ridiculous piece of crap this A1 article by Anne Kornblut is, proclaiming that Eric Holder is having a good week.

It parrots conventional wisdom about what a bad time Eric Holder has had–pointing to turf battles he lost, rather than matters reflecting on the success or failure of DOJ itself. And then proclaims that the arrest of Faisal Shahzad makes all those political battles disappear, at least for this week. For Anne Kornblut, it’s more valuable for the Attorney General to win the approval of a bunch of demagoguing political enemies than to get one after another terrorist to plead guilty and cooperate with the government.

Which sort of tells you about Kornblut’s judgment.

But it’s not Kornblut’s judgment that is most ridiculous in this article. It’s Rahm and David Axlerod’s:

Likewise, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel acknowledged that Holder had “a very good week,” comparing his ups and downs to those experienced by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. “A year ago, people were saying Geithner isn’t what he’s supposed to be — and now he has his mojo back,” Emanuel said Wednesday. “The same with Eric.”

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, drew an identical comparison in a separate interview, saying: “Washington is a town of ups and downs, and there are other members of the administration — I think of Geithner, for example — who was in the barrel for a while. And it’s just the way this town works.”

So apparently Anne Kornblut felt her little theory that Eric Holder had a good week was important enough to ask the White House Chief of Staff about.

Really, Anne? That’s what you waste Rahm’s time with? Rather than, say, a question about the coordination between Janet Napolitano and John Brennan on terror strikes and oil spills, something that is not only part of the Chief of Staff’s job description but actually matters?

Apparently, though, both Rahm and Axe not only took her call to answer such an inane question, but they gave her … exactly the same answer. “Sure Anne, Holder has had a good week, but have you noticed what a good week Timmeh is having?” That is, both of them magically turned her inquiry about Holder’s mojo into a question to highlight what they claim to be Tim Geithner’s mojo.

Really, Rahm? Really, Axe?

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