A quck contrast. Want to see the difference between lazy, by-the-numbers, pseudo-objective reporting and reporting that regards objectivity as something more than just a rhetorical stance? Compare Jim Rutenberg's "they all do it" piece from last Thursday on the state of the presidential ad campaigns ("Campaign Ads Are Under Fire for Inaccuracy") with what Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei do today in the Washington Post:

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate. ...

"There is more attack now on the Bush side against Kerry than you've historically had in the general-election period against either candidate," said University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communication. "This is a very high level of attack, particularly for an incumbent."

Brown University professor Darrell West, author of a book on political advertising, said Bush's level of negative advertising is already higher than the levels reached in the 2000, 1996 and 1992 campaigns. And because campaigns typically become more negative as the election nears, "I'm anticipating it's going to be the most negative campaign ever," eclipsing 1988, West said. "If you compare the early stage of campaigns, virtually none of the early ads were negative, even in '88."

"From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity"

For Rutenberg, of course, it was sooo much easier—not to mention more friendly to the gods of the Administration, to whom Rutenberg has a history of bending the knee—to slip into a "plague on both houses" stance and avoid numbers or historical comparison—and with them a sense of dimension and proportion. [In general, Rutenberg doesn't seem to cotton much to that sort of truth-seeking objectivity. Much better when it's just a veneer. Rutenberg's also turned up here at Reading A1 flacking for the sort of media "analysis" perpetrated by Brent Bozell's wingnut Media Research Center.]

Go to the Daily Howler for a fuller takeout of Rutenberg's latest embarrassing, shabby excuse for media reporting. I just wanted to point up a contrast, and wonder, yet again, why the Times continues to allow jokers like Rutenberg consistent access to A1.

posted by michael  2:00:19 PM  
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A lot of dish in Franklin Foer's New York Magazine piece on Judith Miller, less meat. [Link via Atrios.] In particular, the piece resists focusing on Miller's business and ideological relationship to the neocon establishment whose agendas (and players) she promoted. [It's an influence network that Miller was part of, for God's sake.] But the dish-to-meat ratio changes dramatically when Foer writes about the internal landscape at the Times. In particular, Foer makes it look as if Howell Raines' response to last Wednesday's Editor's Note is disingenuous, at best, and at worst something like a pack of lies: and that Raines bears primary responsibility for having set the Times marching to the beat of Miller's WMD drum. I'm going to break from usual practice and post a longish set of excerpts.

When the Times published its editor’s note last week, it read, “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”

This was a bit too sweeping. While there were no heroes within the Times, there were editors who raised serious and consistent doubts about Miller’s reportage. During the run-up to the war, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller’s overreliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions, especially Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. For instance, Frantz rejected a proposal for a story in which Pentagon officials claimed to have identified between 400 and 1,000 WMD sites, without providing much backup evidence to justify their claims. “At the time, people knew her reporting was suspect and they said so,” one Timesman told me. But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed management’s faith in her by putting her stories on page 1.

Raines had a clear reason to defend Miller. By early 2002, she had become one of the paper’s most valuable assets. The Times was being soundly challenged by the Washington Post in its coverage of the war on terror. ... For a man who made it his mission to raise the paper’s “competitive metabolism” and expressed his thoughts in sports metaphors, the defeat was especially painful. Judith Miller was the strongest card he had to play. No other reporter had managed to win the trust of the administration hawks and could so consistently deliver Post-beating scoops.

There were also ideological reasons for him to turn to Miller. During the summer of 2002, Raines had taken a beating for stories by Patrick Tyler that raised questions about support for the war among the Republican foreign-policy establishment. (To be sure, Tyler’s story had arguably attributed antiwar sentiments to Henry Kissinger that he didn’t hold.) The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol pummeled Raines for surrendering to his biases, placing the Times in an “axis of appeasement” that had “now mobilized in a desperate effort to deflect the president from implementing his policy.”

The Raines response was very un-Rainesian. Instead of “flooding the zone” and pushing ahead with a crusade, he told one close friend that he wanted to prove that he could cover a story straight. An ex-Times editor told me, “He wanted to throw off his liberal credentials and demonstrate that he was fair-minded about the Bush administration. This meant that he bent over backwards to back them often.” In October 2002, James Risen ran an authoritative story casting serious doubt on a purported Prague meeting between the 9/11 terrorist Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence—a meeting that supporters of the war trumpeted as evidence of a Bin Laden–Hussein nexus. Because the story had run in the Monday paper, Raines didn’t have a chance to vet it over the weekend. After the fact, he complained to an editor that it had gone too far. A former editor says, “In the months before the war, Raines consistently objected to articles that questioned the administration’s claims about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda and September 11 while never raising a doubt about Miller’s more dubiously sourced pieces about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.”

Another management problem was that Miller, like many in her profession, didn’t take well to editing. “Judy has never been shy about crawling over the heads of editors,” says one retired Times colleague. And Raines had crafted Judy’s assignment so that it became extremely easy for her to circumvent the desks. According to one of her editors, she worked stories for investigative one day, foreign the next, and the Washington bureau the day after. It was never clear who controlled or edited her. When one desk stymied her, she’d simply hustle over to another and pitch her story there.

As an example of Raines' blame-shifting tactics, by the way, take this from his letter to the LA Times:

In the years just prior to my editorship, it is my understanding that much of Ms. Miller's work was edited by Steve Engelberg, now of the Portland Oregonian. In his post as investigative editor, Mr. Engelberg reported directly to Bill Keller, then the managing editor of the paper and now its executive editor. When I was executive editor, her work flowed through various editors, including Mr. Engelberg ...

That "in the years just prior to my editorship" is as weaselly as it gets. The timeline, as it happens, doesn't break at all in Raines' favor, so he has to massage it. Foer, writing about the challenge Miller's aggressiveness and uncollegiality posed to her editors, quotes a source saying that only Engelberg "had the skill, energy and willingness" to harness Miller, and Foer goes on to note that "after Engelberg edited a series on Al Qaeda for which Miller and her unit won a Pulitzer in 2001 [actually taking his new post in June 2002, and thus before the most aggressive WMD period], he left the paper, leaving Miller without the strong hand capable of directing and containing her zealousness."

Leaving a reader to question whether it's possible to believe anything Howell Raines says about his tenure at the Times.

posted by michael  1:22:06 PM  
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Promoting American interests, while promoting your own. Can't help wondering what level of exposure it'll take to force the Times to finally cut the cord and let Judith Miller drop. Can't imagine why any other reputable journalistic outfit would want to hire her when and if that happens. But don't cry for Judy: I'm sure she'll be able to turn a tidy little dime selling herself to the monied, anti-Muslim winger fringe. After all, she's already got some experience in that line. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here's a look at Miller giving her career a boost in April 2003, on the roster of experts flacked by Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum—motto, "Promoting American Interests." (Judy's specialties: "Militant Islam, Biological warfare.") This is waybacked because she's not there now, though she'd spent the better part of a year on the list when this snapshot was taken. What are the odds that Judy still has Pipes on her speed dial?


posted by michael  1:06:22 PM  
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Rummy's Rules for the NYT. Dan Okrent's column today implies—without specific reporting or genuine critical assessment—a systematic perversion of the Times' long-standing, institutional structures of self-critique and self-correction in the runup to the Iraq war. An unnamed reporter (who we can feel pretty confident is Judith Miller) protected WMD sources "not just from exposure but from unfriendly reporting by colleagues." "A dysfunctional system" had somehow sprung up, one that "enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management."

Remind you of anything?

John Pike, an intelligence expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org,  ... describes the Office of Special Plans as "Rummy's war room." Other critics are convinced the operation was manipulating information, and worse, disturbing the peer-review method within the intelligence community. "There's a formal, well-established intelligence process in Washington, which Rumsfeld apparently wanted to circumvent" by creating the office ...

Eric Boehlert, July 16, 2003, "Rumsfeld's personal spy ring"

The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as "stovepiping"—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. ... Kenneth Pollack ... told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership."

Seymour Hersh, Oct. 27, 2003, "The Stovepipe"

Looks like Rummy's rules (in this case, the rule of the bureaucratic end-around) are just as useful within a newspaper as they are within the Pentagon. Bill Keller, meet Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone.

Okrent ends his column with a pious Times-longa-vita-breva flourish:

The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote that The Times had missed the real story of the Bolshevik Revolution because its writers and editors "were nervously excited by exciting events." That could have been said about The Times and the war in Iraq. The excitement's over; now the work begins.

Actually, the work has been going on for a while. And you'll pardon my skepticism that any of it—anything that cuts to the bone—is going to be advanced by the Times: whose current executive editor was managing editor during the period of the Judith Miller ascendancy and who oversaw that "dysfunctional system." (And who continues to express unreserved admiration for Miller.) Fortunately, it looks like Michael Massing is still on the case. Here's Tim Rutten in the left-coast Times:

Next week's edition of New York magazine will contain a critical profile of Miller, while a piece on Chalabi in the New Yorker — according to sources there — will touch on the Iraqi's relationship with the Times, which at one point employed his daughter. Meanwhile, the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books will contain another appraisal of the Times' coverage by Michael Massing, former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, who has been the most formidable of the Times' critics in this affair.

Astutely, Rutten follows by saying that "viewed in this context, the Times' explanation looks like a leaky lifeboat launched in the teeth of a gathering storm."

posted by michael  12:52:35 PM  
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The word from Pastor Dan. Daniel Okrent's rhetorical stance is always, "We journalists." His job, as he seems to take it, is to offer the (perversely uncomprehending) masses a glimpse into the mysteries of the trade. Okrent writes as if the "public" part of public editor were a suggestion of taint: as if his chief concern was to make sure that nobody in the fraternity could mistake him for one of those hairy, gap-toothed outsiders.

Today, Okrent unveils the "complex special project" his absence-of-a-column column hinted at last week: a report (the inanely, and inconsequentially, titled "Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?") on what pretty much everyone whose paycheck isn't signed by Arthur Sulzberger thinks is the Times' worst systematic fuckup ever, its pre-war WMD reporting. [You'll look in vain, by the way, for the "public editor" to assess the nature of the Times' public authority, and the damage sustained to that authority by the paper's massive failure of responsibility in the runup to war. If I were a public editor, that's probably where I'd start my approach to this issue. Okrent, of course, has already dismissed the idea that the Times has any special authority in American life, and thus any unusual responsibility to its readers or to the record.] And though there is, in fact, real substance behind today's column, Okrent obstinately refuses to write to it. Reviewing the story of a systematic failure—of a paper whose journalistic process was biased toward promoting a war, and suppressing arguments against it—Okrent cannot or will not reckon systematically with it. Instead he produces a disjunct sequence of preening, clubby little homilies, like this one on "hit-and-run journalism" (i.e., the failure to provide follow-up to stories with extraordinary claims):

Stories, like plants, die if they are not tended. So do the reputations of newspapers.

Really, that's sweet. It may have given Dan a warm feeling writing that: but if there are motives, and patterns, in the failure to follow up sensational WMD stories, you won't hear it here. Okrent's basic position, like that of Wednesday's Editor's Note, is that the Times failed to live up to its own best standards: sermonettes about those standards seem the appropriate response. Why the Times' lapse from its best self should have happened in this instance, and should have worked so rigorously in a single direction, remains a bit of a mystery—but not an urgent one, by any means. Something in the water, maybe.

So where in Okrent's piece is the beef? He in fact alleges what looks like serious internal misconduct tending towards open reportorial and editorial bias—though without being so impolite as to call attention to it as misconduct.

The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source - the offer of information in return for anonymity - is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper's readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others. (See Chalabi, Ahmad, et al.) Beyond that, when the cultivation of a source leads to what amounts to a free pass for the source, truth takes the fall. A reporter who protects a source not just from exposure but from unfriendly reporting by colleagues is severely compromised. Reporters must be willing to help reveal a source's misdeeds; information does not earn immunity.

In the midst of all that moralistic phrase-turning ("truth takes the fall," indeed!) is a nugget of actual information. Who Judith Miller, one wonders, could that rogue reporter have been, and how is it that he/she was allowed to determine what other reporters could and couldn't write? (For that matter, if this is true how does he/she still have a job? Doesn't such behavior count as something a bit more than simply being overprotective of a source?)

Then, a couple of grafs later, in the last of the day's sermonettes, another nugget:

My own reporting (I have spoken to nearly two dozen current and former Times staff members whose work touched on W.M.D. coverage) has convinced me that a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management.

In some instances, reporters who raised substantive questions about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to express reservations. It is axiomatic in newsrooms that any given reporter's story, tacked up on a dartboard, can be pierced by challenges from any number of colleagues. But a commitment to scrutiny is a cardinal virtue. When a particular story is consciously shielded from such challenges, it suggests that it contains something that plausibly should be challenged.

For an instant it seems like Okrent is about to go off the reservation. But no, nothing specific about that "dysfunctional system," much less about how it was created and maintained, is forthcoming. Look at the passives in that second graf: reporters who raised questions "were not heeded," "some" who had knowledge "seem not to have been given the chance" to offer criticisms. No names, either, God forbid. Could the Editor's Note have been any more oblique? By the end of the paragraph we're safely back in the homiletic realm of "commitments" and "cardinal virtues."

It's nice that Dan took the trouble to have all those conversations with his colleagues. Shows real diligence. And while he may be too high-minded for this, Dan, here's a clue from a common reader: gathering information you don't publish isn't reporting, it's hoarding.

posted by michael  11:15:14 AM  
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Ralph, Ralph, he's your man! Ralph Nader's fantasy-league Presidential candidacy may have no more determined advocates these days than the New York Times' political correspondents.

Two weeks ago Jodi Wilgoren turned an article on the challenge Kerry would face calibrating his position vis à vis Bush on Iraq into a long disquisition on the supposed Nader threat. Adam Nagourney, who's really been churning 'em out lately, popped up on Wednesday with another stab at Wilgoren's topic, a bit more focused on Bush but once again selling the line that Ralph was likely to hem Kerry in hard on the antiwar flank. Today, Nagourney again, palpably irritated at what he calls "an unusual display of pragmatism by the Democratic left":

Senator John Kerry found himself on familiar ground when he talked about Iraq in a speech on Wednesday: out of step with much of his own party. Once again, Republicans and even some Democrats said, Mr. Kerry appeared on the verge of squabbling with the antiwar base of his party.

But that has not happened, even in a week in which Mr. Kerry rejected calls from the antiwar Democrats to set a deadline for the withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq. If anything, Democrats have grown more enthusiastic in rallying around Mr. Kerry, dismissing as inconsequential their differences with him on this presumably central issue.

"Why the Democrats' Left Wing Is Muted"

So near to a juicy intra-party squabble, yet so far! You can taste Nagourney's scorn for those unprincipled antiwar people, and their obstinate refusal to drive off the cliff he (and those nice folks at the RNC) have so helpfully pointed them toward. He shares that feeling with Ralph, who gets the last word in the piece:

Mr. Nader said he could not understand why unions, antiwar groups and other traditional Democratic constituencies were signing on with Mr. Kerry without insisting they get something in return. And he criticized Mr. Kerry for not making real concessions to the antiwar crowd.

"He's listening to Shrum," said Mr. Nader, referring to Mr. Kerry's senior political adviser, Bob Shrum. "He's listening to all the cautious advisers. They are saying don't cater to these antiwar people, they have nowhere to go. They are going to vote for you. You know the old game."

It's not just that Nagourney's disappointed in seeing a pet anti-Kerry narrative fail to blossom. What's happening is a challenge to the Nagourneyite mode of production itself: what's Adam to do if his rolodex of Dem insiders can no longer reliably produce an article's worth of handwringing quotes around the approved themes? On the evidence of today's piece, the situation indeed looks dire. All Adam has left to write about is how he got himself bitchslapped working his beat:

"Kerry has less of a problem on the left in the Democratic Party than any Democratic candidate in my memory, which goes back to Kennedy," said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts ... Still, Mr. Kerry's situation is more complicated in one critical way: The candidacy of Ralph Nader, who is providing a liberal alternative to voters who might feel put off by Mr. Kerry. ...

Joe Trippi, who was Dr. Dean's campaign manager, said he did not believe Mr. Kerry's position on the war would hurt him even among Dr. Dean's voters, and scoffed at the suggestion that some of them might go to Mr. Nader.

"On the war, I don't think there's a problem there at all," Mr. Trippi said, adding: "Even the Nader fanatics won't do it because of George Bush. They don't want another four years of this guy."

Former Representative Tom Andrews, a Democrat from Maine who now heads an umbrella group of antiwar organizations, Win Without War, said: "Everyone in the coalition I have talked to is supporting Kerry. There is no sentiment to support Nader."

Picture Adam Nagourney phoning through his list of left-wing Democrats, trying to get somebody, anybody, to pony up with the requisite Nader scare quote: "C'mon, help me out just this once, willya? I'm on deadline ..." What's an old access whore to do when the johns aren't in a buying mood?

Still, hope springs eternal. Nagourney's gonna give us a Nader threat even if he has to invent it, and the supporting critique, on his own responsibility. Joe Trippi may have said no, no, but Adam's convinced himself that was a yes in his eyes:

Still, Mr. Nader remains a big unknown here. While some Kerry aides said they were hopeful that this same [anybody-but-Bush] dynamic would significantly minimize Mr. Nader's showing in November, a number of polls have suggested that Mr. Nader will hurt Mr. Kerry. Mr. Trippi disputed that, but said that Mr. Nader might end up affecting the election if polls in the final days show Mr. Kerry with a comfortable advantage, leading some antiwar Democrats to feel they can cast protest votes with Mr. Nader.

Mr. Kerry broke with many Democrats in supporting the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war, and spent much of the primary season trying to explain that vote to anti-war Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire. He is now calling for bringing in the United Nations and NATO to help calm the situation in Iraq; like Mr. Bush, he said he is open to sending more troops to Iraq, if necessary, and would oppose for now setting a deadline for withdrawal.

There you go: Nagourney's even provided the antiwar left with a handy, brief guide to why Kerry's all wrong for us. If we persist in misguidedly making this a race between Kerry and Bush, it won't be for lack of diligence on Adam Nagourney's part.

posted by michael  4:02:05 PM  
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WHY THE HELL ARE YOU STILL READING US? DOES JUDITH MILLER HAVE TO KILL YOU HERSELF? Get Your War On does the Times.


posted by michael  1:31:57 PM  
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Everything's coming up Sistani. Imagine my discomfort at agreeing, even provisionally, with a right-winger. Here's Tacitus on the (apparent, and obviously fragile) deal to end the American offensive against Moqtada al Sadr:

As with Fallujah, so with Sadr: it appears we are choosing an illusory political solution and abandoning our original stated goals. ... Expect CPA rhetoric shortly on how Najaf, et al., are "secure," and how the "fighting has ended," or something very similar. These things will be presented as victories, as if they were our aims all along. But they weren't: Najaf was never a wholesale city in arms the way Fallujah was, and we had no interest in holding it for its own sake; and our stated aims in this campaign were the death or capture of Moqtada Sadr, and the destruction of the Mehdi Army. Neither of these aims were achieved. This is not victory.

The Mehdi Army remains a force in being. Moqtada al-Sadr walks free. And, as in Anbar province, home of Fallujah, we can expect that the killing will simply shift elsewhere. Another American failure to secure victory begins its slow transformation into a perceived American defeat. Question: are we at all capable of articulating and sticking with a coherent strategic or operational goal? Why not?

Needless to say, I don't share Tacitus' warblogger angst about the developments, nor his conclusion (follow the link within the quote to his remarkable Fallujah cri de coeur) that the better part would be to fight the thing through to its bloody and politically impossible end.

Yes, ruthlessly pursued, a war of attrition against the Mahdi army would have resulted in its annihilation and Sadr's death or arrest. Just as, certainly, we might have wreaked wholesale slaughter on Fallujah (as opposed to the moderate and piecemeal slaughter we committed instead) until opposition there ceased. What commentators like Tacitus seem incapable of understanding is that not every act of restraint, nor every retreat, of a superior military force in the face of an inferior represents a mere failure of backbone or of strategic vision. I certainly wouldn't be last in line to accuse this Administration of fecklessness and wavering in its conduct of the war in Iraq. But the Bush mistake—on the smaller scale (Fallujah, Najaf) as on the larger (the Iraq invasion itself)—is always in beginning the fight in the first place. Unlike Tacitus, I have no desire to see good money, as it were, thrown after bad. There are "victories" that are too costly to bear: and political costs are real costs in war, just as lives are.

Tacitus might have realized what cooler heads at the CPA evidently did, when they decided belatedly to accept a démarche that Sadr had already proposed earlier in the week, if he'd read the Times story on the agreement. (Admittedly, he'd have had to persist through to the jump page, where Derek Filkins—who appears to be trying as hard as he can to soft-pedal the "compromise"—buries some real information that nobody else seems to have.)

The agreement fell into place after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, sent a message to the Americans urging them to approve the deal.

According to two Iraqi Shiite leaders, American officials signed onto the agreement after they received a forceful note from Ayatollah Sistani and other senior clerics, passed to them by Iraqi's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie.

"The religious leadership passed a strong warning to the Americans yesterday to end the standoff in Najaf peacefully," said Hamed Khafaf, an aide to Ayatollah Sistani.

Had they refused, Mr. Khafaf said, the ayatollah, convinced that the presence of American forces so near the Imam Ali Shrine was unsustainable, "would not stay silent." That appeared to be a threat to speak out directly against the Americans.

"Agreement by U.S. and Rebels to End Fighting in Najaf"

Clear enough? Even here, Filkins tries to cushion the blow: but the deal hardly just "fell into place," and this was clearly more than the mere sending of a message. Sistani, who from the appearance of this thing has found an opportunity to reassert his political control, made it clear to the Americans that the victory toward which they were driving would be attended with consequences they could not, in any prudence, accept. The likeliest consequence being a Sistani fatwa against the American presence in Iraq, or something not far short of it.

Tacitus may be willing to accept a general Shiite uprising as a price worth paying for our showing resolve against Moqtada al Sadr. For myself, I'm glad that Jerry Bremer et al. aren't.

posted by michael  12:54:37 PM  
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Naming names. From reader Ben Brackley, a Romenesko item about yesterday's WMD Editor's Note. Howell Raines, who was executive editor at the time of the disputed reporting by Judith Miller and others, emailed Tim Rutten of the LA Times with his reactions to the note. (The NYT didn't contact Raines before the Editor's Note was published.) Worth reading. For me the money graf is the one in which Raines, unlike his successor Bill Keller (who, incidentally, calls the note "an explanation" rather than an apology, pretty much in accord with my take on it), names names:

I assume that Judith Miller is the "individual" reporter who, according to the editors' note, is being singled out by outside critics. Like other Times readers, I could not tell from today's note what the editors found out about the disputes over her stories. I do know that while Judy Miller's work has been widely discussed, her reporting on Al Qaeda was prescient, and much of her work on terrorism over the years has been highly regarded. In any event, on the general subject of Ms. Miller's journalism, there is no shortage of in-house knowledge at The Times. In the years just prior to my editorship, it is my understanding that much of Ms. Miller's work was edited by Steve Engelberg, now of the Portland Oregonian. In his post as investigative editor, Mr. Engelberg reported directly to Bill Keller, then the managing editor of the paper and now its executive editor. When I was executive editor, her work flowed through various editors, including Mr. Engelberg and later Doug Frantz, now of the Los Angeles Times. During my editorship, Ms. Miller also worked often in the Times's Washington Bureau. The bureau chief at that time, Jill Abramson, told me that she had a good rapport with Ms. Miller, who had a conflicted relationship with some colleagues. Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor, supervised a significant amount of Ms. Miller's reporting and personally edited the resulting stories before they went into the paper. It seems to me unfair to single out Judy Miller, even in a blind reference, or to cite individual stories by other reporters without drawing aside the veil of anonymity around un-bylined editors who worked with them.

Remarkable bit of chop-socky, and goes some way toward drawing the veil that Keller's note places in front of the editorial process. As Raines insists, "To achieve full disclosure of the sort I advocated as editor, detailed news stories are needed in addition to editors' notes to inform readers fully about how the paper operates."

As numerous people have remarked, Daniel Okrent is expected to use his Sunday column to report further on the issue. I suppose it's in order to wait and see, but frankly if a typically fangless Okrent piece is where this story goes to die (as far as the Times is concerned), I won't be surprised.

posted by michael  7:25:48 PM  
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Contemplate, if you will, the level of intellectual refinement necessary to produce these sentences:

There is clearly a political component at play [in Bush's shifts of position on Iraq policy], as the White House seeks, while managing its own problems, to create a predicament for Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent. ... The fact that Mr. Bush has moved close to Mr. Kerry on some of these questions makes it much more difficult for Mr. Kerry to take advantage of what Democrats and Republicans view as the biggest political crisis of Mr. Bush's presidency, by emphasizing differences between them.

Adam Nagourney and Richard W. Stevenson, "Candidates' Iraq Policies Share Many Similarities"

[This is from yesterday's installment in Adam Nagourney's new series, "Bush Troubles Doom Kerry."] Reader—poor, blinkered, uninitiated reader—you see not with the eyes of a New York Times High Political Mandarin. For if you did, you would realize that all politics, distilled to its essence, is a contest of rhetorics: and that political advantage and disadvantage is finally determined by how candidates jockey with each other in speeches and position statements.

So, with the blood-dimmed tide loosed in Iraq, Bush obviously has Kerry exactly where he wants him! Caught between the rock of Bush's cleverly calibrated "we're identical cousins" policy shifts, and the hard place of Al Gore's antiwar rhetoric, how will Kerry wriggle free? Nagourneyson suggest that the only chip Kerry has left to play is a criticism of Bush's "credibility," an assertion that Bush is held in such disrepute around the world "that only a new president can rally other nations to provide the necessary assistance" to turn things around in Iraq. Since, as Stevengourney are aware, all politics is rhetoric, they can dispense with consideration of whether Kerry's assertion is true, and if true a real constraint on policy. They don't come out and say it, but Nagourson seem to find the "credibility" gag pretty thin rhetorical soup. After all, how can Kerry claim he's more credible than Bush? Credibility, as we all know, isn't part of the approved Kerry memes—that's Bush territory! Foolish, foolish John Kerry: you've just fallen further into Dubya's trap.

posted by michael  5:42:22 PM  
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Strength is weakness, opportunity is peril. Adam Nagourney's been writing essentially the same article for months now, since John Kerry emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee: Kerry faces major challenges, his campaign strategy/organization/presence is weak, how can he hope to win? Same two-step research procedure, too: (1) determine relevant Kerry sub-narrative; (2) curry through the list of Democratic insiders to assemble phalanx of hand-wringing quotes. Nagourney can probably cook one of these pieces up in a spare half-hour—wouldn't surprise me if he's got a bunch pre-written, ready to be pulled off the shelf, tricked up with a few topical references and sent off to market.

As Bush loses support and starts to move into Daddy territory, it requires a bit more ingenuity to sustain this production model, but Nagourney seems well up to the challenge. (Hell, he's delivered two on-topic articles in the last two days alone! If this were Stalinist Russia instead of Stalinist W. 43rd St., Nagourney would have been declared a Stakhanovite by now.) I'm going to clue you in on the strategy, but before I do, a warning: This rhetorical strategy reflects the deep wisdom of a veteran Times political reporter. Please do not try applying it by yourself, or while operating heavy machinery, or if you are in any way impaired by common sense.

Nagourney's wisdom: Nothing is more dangerous to Kerry than a failing Bush candidacy. (If it bothers you that this contradicts the earlier approved wisdom, which stated that Bush's strength on terrorism was likely to overwhelm Kerry, see my warning above.) A range of polls shows Bush's approval tanking, shows Kerry beginning to assume a statistically meaningful lead (even with fantasy-league candidate Ralph Nader in the mix). Watch and tremble, you masses, as Adam Nagourney suits up with the appropriate Kerry storyline and executes a perfect backflip into the deep waters of "some Democrats" and their "concerns":

In many ways, the Kerry on display this spring is keeping with his political style for the past 20 years. In campaigns, Mr. Kerry has not been inclined to take chances or make bold moves, and he is known among campaign strategists for a propensity to glide until, as one put it, his back is up against the wall.

This year, Mr. Kerry's most daring political move — investing all his resources in Iowa — came only as he appeared to face defeat in New Hampshire by Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor. ...

Some Democrats said they were concerned that, given Mr. Kerry's history as a candidate, these recent polls would encourage the less competitive side of Mr. Kerry's personality. A senior Kerry aide said that the campaign had to resist being lulled into complacency by polls that show Mr. Bush in trouble.

"Democrats Wonder if Kerry Should Stay on Careful Path"

Nagourney gets a degree-of-difficulty bonus on this one, too, because he manages to slide in the Kerry-is-a-weakling meme with that reference to the Senator's "less competitive side."

I'm confident that by the time January rolls around, Adam Nagourney will have figured out a way to demonstrate mathematically that Kerry's inauguration represents the end-stage of his political demise.

posted by michael  4:01:39 PM  
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So here it is at last, the distinguished thing. On A10 today, the long-awaited Editor's Note discussing the Times' acceptance and promotion of WMD fantasies in the run-up to the Iraq war. Jack Shafer, who reported in Slate yesterday that the Note was coming down the pike ("Judy's Turn To Cry"), shouldn't have gotten his hopes up.

The glaring fact about the Times' nostra culpa, the key to the position as it were, is that Judith Miller is named nowhere in it. She's been unpersoned, the result of the delicate balancing act the Times has set itself, of offering an appearance of self-critique while cleaving to some deep principle of corporate omerta. Is there any question that the following is meant as a big fuck-you to Shafer, Michael Massing, and anybody else who's criticized Miller's reporting?

Some critics of our coverage during [the pre-war period] have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated.

Lovely word, complicated. Translation: you naive people who focus on "individual reporters," you just don't understand how a newspaper works. (An attitude the Editor's Note further exemplifies when it calls out an evasive, distorted letter, written by NYT military affairs correspondent Michael Gorden in reply to Massing's NYRB critique, as "a primer on the complexities" of intelligence reporting.) Here are the "complications" the Times thinks have eluded all of us outsiders:

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

We were insufficiently skeptical: that represents the outer limit of culpability to which the Editor's Note will admit. And really, is it so difficult to see how the newspaperly virtues of competitiveness ("rushing scoops") and love of the juicy story ("dire claims") might have become vices in this instance? Add to these cultural factors the now-regrettable affiliation with Chalabi (which the Times is careful to stress it was not alone in), and you have the makings of a series of what the Note calls, in its finely measured voice, "problematic articles."

Writing in advance of the apearance of the Editor's Note, Jack Shafer wondered how it was going to break: whether it would "excoriate reporters only," in a black-and-white "they failed" maneuver, or would "rebuke Times editors, too," producing "a more nuanced critique." Well, there's nuance out the wazoo here. In fact—something I don't think Shafer would have expected—far from excoriating their reporters, essentially the editors are taking the fall for them (well, for her, basically—She Who Must Not Be Named). Why is that?

Look again at the Note's explanation of those "complications" we need to understand.

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted.

Whose "strong desire" are we talking about? It's almost a Freudian slip: the antecedent of "their" is, of course, "Iraqi defectors"—but it's hard not to feel it gravitating toward the subject of the previous sentence, "editors." Which is exactly the point. The Times didn't just produce "problematic" reporting in the runup to war. It produced reporting systematically distorted by a desire that had hardened into a policy conclusion: Saddam Hussein had to go, and a war had to be fought to oust him.

The Times won't talk about editorial bias. You don't get to be managing editor of the NYT by being a fool, and Bill Keller's no fool. He knows how this thing looks out in the world. His paper (with Howell Raines at the helm throughout the period) allowed its coverage of the crucial, the overriding rationale for war to be hijacked by a reporter with an ideological agenda, one who had extensive, long-standing social and business ties to Chalabi and to the neocon establishment promoting the war. (I'll post a fun little Judy Miller dossier in a bit, but a good start is Daniel Forbes' article about Miller's ties to the wingnut Middle East Forum.) The paper wasn't simply taken in by a con man and by its own pardonable wish to be out in front of a major story—"disingenuous" is a kind word for what the Editor's Note is doing arguing that position. Repeatedly, as Michael Massing has demonstrated, the Times turned its front page over to a writer who had committed herself to advancing the cause of her friends and ideological fellow travelers, and who as a consequence completely and unfairly dismissed any criticisms or counterevidence offered by their bureaucratic opponents (or by independent sources). Simply put, on the WMD issue the Times failed to act as an honest broker of information. It had every opportunity in the world to know it, and to avoid putting itself in that position: and it refused. The reasons are opaque, but the suspicion inevitably arises that the editors deliberately used the news columns of the Times to promote a favored policy, and thus bear a heavy burden of responsibility for manipulating public opinion toward support for an unjustified war.

The editors aren't covering for Miller out of love. A proper, rigorous accounting of what the Times did with its WMD reporting is impossible without a rigorous accounting of Miller, her ideology, her allegiances, her intellectual honesty or lack of it. The Times doesn't want that rigorous accounting, because it doesn't want to critique or even consider the use and abuse of its editorial power. Today's Editor's Note isn't self-criticism: it's a tactical feint. Don't fall for it.

posted by michael  2:52:48 PM  
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For what it's worth, A1 coverage of every Presidential Moment since I started this blog in January has followed an inflexible formula: news coverage paired front-and-center with at least one news analysis piece. (The twin-pack, which I wrote about earlier this month.) It's evidently considered the proper compliment the Paper of Record pays to the Executive and to its own importance in the scheme of things. Dubya's Army War College speech last night, which certainly qualifies as a Presidential Moment, does get its analysis today: but the Times goes inside with it, on the jump (A12 in my edition) from Liz Bumiller's straight-news report. I'm not going to get all Kremlinological on this—but you can't help but notice when a chink suddenly appears in the wall.

In an email, the Cunctator, a Kos diarist, asks that I highlight

the difference between the NYT "news analysis" of the Prezzie's speech and the WaPo's analysis...it takes Richard Stevenson many paragraphs of desultory meandering into horse-race campaign coverage to get to the nut, which Wright & Allen get to after a direct, sharp introduction: "After promising 'concrete steps,' the White House basically repackaged stalled U.S. policy as a five-step plan."

Stevenson's version? "If the five-point approach he set out covered all the bases on paper, it still risked appearing detached from the violence and chaos that has threatened to engulf Iraq and extract a heavy political price from Mr. Bush and his fellow Republicans at home."

I think that's as good and as cogent as any highlighting I'd manage to do, so I hope the Cunctator doesn't mind my letting him stand in for me. Past that—honestly, I just can't bring myself to care, about whatever feckless lies and evasions Bush promulgated last night, about the predictable, toadying "seriousness" with which the Times reports the occasion. As Barbara Bush once said, why should I waste my beautiful mind? Some days it's all just a little too much.

posted by michael  3:34:34 PM  
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Abby Goodnough knows it's not about race. Except, of course, when it suits her. Goodnough's A1 article yesterday on the Florida voting system and the state's little problem with disenfranchisement ("Reassurance for Florida Voters Made Wary by Chaos of 2000," headline truncated for the online story) is the latest in what's turning into a nauseating series (my post on Goodnough's earlier story, a heartwarming look at Jeb and the felons, is here). Here's the nut-graf lead—see if you can tell what Goodnough's oh-so-earnest-and-sincere manner is repressing:

The party had barely begun when Shirley Green Knight arrived with her optical-scan voting machine, lugging it out of a pickup truck and stationing it between the D.J. and the food tent. The sight was no longer strange to the people of Gadsden County, where Ms. Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, attends most communal gatherings with the machine and a gently pleading message: Your vote will count this time, so please, please come out.

Gadsden County, a quiet stretch of tomato fields and piney woodlands hard against the Georgia border, had the highest rate of disqualified ballots in Florida in 2000: 12 percent of those cast in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Almost 2,000 county residents voted in vain that year, and cynicism still courses through the heavily Democratic county of 45,000, as regular as summer rain.

"All my life I have never seen the TV stations declare a winner, then change their minds," said Greg Johnson, a fourth grade teacher in Quincy who still wonders if his ballot landed in the scrap heap. "The Supreme Court decided that election, not us. I like politics, but people in power can get away with stuff and I'm just not sure this time."

As Election Day 2004 draws near in a battleground state whose 27 electoral votes could prove crucial to the victor once again, a movement is rising in poor black communities to register and to educate, reassure and entreat. A top goal is to change the mindset of people like Mr. Johnson, who still harbor deep suspicions about everything from the accuracy of voting equipment to how polling places are chosen and what role Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, will play in Florida's outcome.

OK, I couldn't resist dropping in a hint. That's right: the Florida voters who are the subject of this story, voters who were intimidated away or otherwise barred from the polls in 2000, whose votes are disproportionately lost through spoilage, are African-American. You might expect that to be a primary datum for an article about the efforts of Florida blacks to avoid being disenfranchised in 2004, but from her lead Goodnough seems intent on eliding it.

Goodnough's reporting exists in a sunny world from which race has disappeared—as an explanatory category, anyway. The facts of black disenfranchisement are unavoidable, and a different, more skeptical writer might have put them together to depict a system at least open to the charge of being biased against the state's poor, rural, and minority voters. But Goodnough sees no evil: certainly, she doesn't see structure or intent. For her, disenfranchisement in Florida isn't systematic, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened. She scatters the relevant information as widely and disjointedly as possible throughout the article, and never reports any of it, anything that might lead the unwary reader into thinking there's a race issue lurking, without presenting an immediate rebuttal. (Official dismissals are always final in Goodnough's world, and always offered in good faith.) Abby's suffering from a bad case of controversius interruptus, the premature closing of subjects of contention.

Despite the lingering suspicion among blacks, intentional disenfranchisement was never proved, and blatant voter intimidation now seems to have been far more limited than first reported. In Gadsden County, as in Palm Beach and Duval, the root problem was a confusing, badly designed ballot ...

Republicans, who are also courting black voters in some parts of Florida, say the Democrats and their supporters are recklessly rekindling bad feelings that were based on mostly false allegations. They say rumors of black voter intimidation in 2000 remain grossly exaggerated: a Florida Highway Patrol investigation of an unauthorized police checkpoint near a precinct in a black neighborhood outside Tallahassee, for example, found no evidence that it delayed or prevented blacks from voting ...

The real problems in 2000, people like [Palm Beach's Black Republic Caucus chairman Andre] Cadogan say—and several investigations have echoed—were faulty equipment and voter error, issues that elected officials and advocacy groups have been addressing, with varying energy and success, ever since ...

Many [black voters] also deeply distrust Florida's process of removing felons, who lose their voting rights when convicted, from the rolls. Each county gets lists of potential felons from a central database, and is supposed to determine whether the information is accurate. But in 2000, the counties mistakenly purged an unknown number of legitimate voters from the rolls because of faulty data.

In Goodnough's world, everything is about feelings. Even when she acknowledges the Miami Herald/USA Today investigation that found "that 83 of the 100 precincts with the largest numbers of discarded ballots were majority black," where does she go from that? Certainly not to to a consideration of causes:

Anger, shame and fear roiled those precincts afterward, fueled by reports of police roadblocks near black polling places, poll workers turning black voters away and the mysterious disappearance of registered black voters from the rolls. As the extent of Gadsden's problem was discovered, television cameras descended, conspiracy theories brewed, and Gadsden County became an object of national ridicule that haunts it still.

The sentimental narrative of Goodnough's framing device—the patient, long-suffering (and not incidentall female) elections supervisor, who at the end of the piece we see wearily laying down her burden for a while, her "gentle pleading," the suspicious Mr. Johnson and his need for reassurance—functions to short-circuit any possibility of analysis. The only story that Goodnough can see is a story of people irrationally mistrustful, whose "fears of disenfranchisement" have to be "quelled," who believe "rumors," "myths that have circulated since 2000," who (in the manner of simple rural folk) exhibit "suspicion about the new [voting] machinery," for which the proper and only remedy is "education" and "entreaty."

Which is where race does structure her piece, in a kind of return of the repressed. Underlying the article is the hoariest tropology of racial paternalism: Those black people are just a bit too emotional, aren't they? Too easily stirred up ("inflamed" and "distracted," in the words of Black Republican Andre Cadogan), too ready to believe in myths. You have to explain complicated things to them patiently and repeatedly, just like doughty and ironically named Ms. White (who's all but made to exclaim "Lawsy!" before she "eases herself off duty" at the end of the article). [Check out her ealier piece on Jeb Bush if you want to see an even more literalized version of Goodnough's paternalism.]

Is Goodnough herself a racist? Almost certainly not. She's just a consensus-mongering sentimentalist, too stupid to recognize when her pet sentimental tropes happen to bear the racist taint.

Update: Just noted a prior post about Goodnough's article at the excellent Body and Soul, which I'm glad to see is back after Jeanne's leave of absence.

posted by michael  11:13:21 AM  
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Something I'd intended to highlight on Saturday that got lost in the shuffle, from Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt's piece ("Dogs and Other Harsh Tactics Linked to Military Intelligence"):

The documents assembled by Army investigators starting in January and obtained by The New York Times cite accounts by American dog handlers who say the use of military working dogs in interrogations at Abu Ghraib was approved by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Previously, Pentagon and Army officials have said that only the top American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, could have approved the use of the animals for interrogations. A "memorandum for the record" issued on Oct. 9 by the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison listed as permissible a number of interrogation procedures that Army officials have said were allowed only with approval from General Sanchez. Among other things, the memorandum said the use of dogs in interrogations and the confining of prisoners to isolation cells was permitted in some cases without a prior approval from General Sanchez. ...

A new time line provided by an Army spokesman also showed that the involvement of military intelligence personnel in abuses at Abu Ghraib began in October 2003. The first reported episode involved soldiers assigned to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, months before the major criminal investigation initiated in January into misconduct at the prison, which focused on the involvement by the military police. Three enlisted soldiers from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion were fined and demoted in the incident.

Jehl/Schmitt, who tend to wag their fingers at the Army for not being propertly forthcoming with information, don't make it clear enough that the Oct. 9 JIDC memorandum was issued ten days before Gen. Sanchez's Oct. 19 order relating to approved techniques for interrogations. (I took a stab at an interrogation-policy timline, which I probably need to update in light of recent reporting, here.) Just what is a "memorandum for the record," and why was it produced—particularly in a way that would seem to anticipate if not pre-empt the policy being developed by Sanchez?

Jehl/Schmitt also don't make it clear that the punishments of three soldiers from the 519th were administrative—minor punishments meted out by the unit's commander without invoking court-martial proceedings. According to the Denver Post, the case file from the incident "notes that the investigation, which still had 'leads remaining,' was terminated" by the decision to hand down an administrative punishment. Military intelligence, in other words (remember that the January criminal investigation and the Taguba report were limited in focus to military police), seems to have been keeping both policy and punishment well in its own hands.

Add these observations to reinforce the possibility that MI in Iraq was operating in some sense as an irregular command, independent of the ordinary chain of command under Sanchez.

posted by michael  4:22:45 PM  
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A question goes begging in today's article by Douglas Jehl and Neil A. Lewis on the Army's legal response last December to the initial Red Cross report of torture at Abu Ghraib ("U.S. Disputed Protected Status of Iraq Inmates").

Presented last fall with a detailed catalog of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the American military responded on Dec. 24 with a confidential letter to a Red Cross official asserting that many Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions. ...

The International Committee of the Red Cross had reported in November that its staff, in a series of visits to Abu Ghraib in October, had "documented and witnessed" ill treatment that "included deliberate physical violence" as well as verbal abuse, forced nudity and prolonged handcuffing in uncomfortable positions.

In Congressional testimony last week, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, asserted that the Dec. 24 response demonstrated that the military had fully addressed the Red Cross complaints.

But the three-page response did not address many of the specific concerns cited by the Red Cross, whose main recommendations included improving the treatment of prisoners held for interrogation.

Instead, much of the military's reply is devoted to presenting a legal justification for the treatment of a broad category of Iraqi prisoners, including hundreds identified by the United States as "security detainees" in a cellblock at Abu Ghraib and in another facility known as Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport, where the Red Cross had also found abuses. ...

Under the argument advanced by the military, Iraqi prisoners who are deemed security risks can be denied the right to communicate with others, and perhaps other rights and privileges, at least until the overall security situation in Iraq improves. The military's rationale relied on a legal exemption within the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Nice, huh? The Administration has asserted of late that all prisoners in Iraq are covered under the Geneva Conventions. They neglected to mention the fine print by which "covered," for at least some of those prisoners, means "dropped into the torture pit thanks to our interpretation of a loophole" in the Conventions.

But just tsk-tsking at the Army's mischaracterization of its response to the ICRC misses the point. Was this "legal justification" for detainee torture something cobbled together at the time of the response to the ICRC by a couple of staff lawyers? Seems unlikely, doesn't it, given what we know about the pervasive effort within the Bush Administration to find ways to undermine if not reverse the longstanding U.S. commitment to respecting the Geneva Conventions? (Joe Conason offers a useful summary of that effort here.)

If the answer is no, as it seems it must be, then when exactly was this justification for the torture of security detainees articulated, and by whom, and on whose authority? There's the begged question. The answer would speak a great deal towards the formalization of torture as policy in Iraq. Jehl and Lewis don't ask it, which I find dismaying and disappointing, since Jehl's own earlier reporting practically demands that the question be posed. Last Tuesday, writing with Eric Schmitt, Jehl noted that the policy of coverage under the Geneva Conventions

is a sharp reversal from the one that Pentagon officials described after the major phase of the war in Iraq ended last May. Then, American officers said that the thousands of prisoners in Iraq were being sorted to determine who among them should be labeled unlawful combatants. ... On Monday, however, a senior military officer said in an e-mail message that "no persons in Iraq have been declared unlawful combatants." The Iraqi prisoners held in the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib have been labeled security detainees. In testimony addressing the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners there, American officials have said that the Geneva accords are "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.

I took Jehl/Schmitt to task at the time for their unwarranted conclusion that this meant that "the Bush administration appears to have concluded that detention and interrogation procedures permitted under the Geneva Conventions were adequate even for suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq." [Today's piece, of course, offers an ironic fill-in for those notions of "permission" and "adequacy."] It seemed likelier to me that the Pentagon, under the pressure of sorting out the prisoner population while trying to produce intelligence from it, had "simply dispensed with the arduous administrative task of sifting" for unlawful-combatant status, and "gave itself, in the bargain, a freer hand to move detainees through whatever interrogation regimes military intelligence (or others) decided would prove useful." The report today suggests that somebody, somewhere, was tasked with creating (or applying) a fig-leaf interpretation of the Geneva Conventions to expedite just such a process. So again: who made the decision to work a loophole in the Conventions, and when?

posted by michael  1:14:35 PM  
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We're all bozos on this bike. So Bush fell off his bike. (Atrios makes the too-easy training wheels juxtaposition here.) Jesse at Pandagon has the relevant links to the various crypto-fascists for whom John Kerry's bike spill about three weeks ago was a sure sign of both his moral degeneracy and his hopelessness as a candidate.

I'll go Jesse one better: back in March, Kerry took a spill on the ski slopes. There was a lot of right-wing flapdoodle about that one, too, that I don't have the patience to search out now. But let's have a Reading A1 flashback: for the Times' chief Kerry snarkologist, David Halbfinger, his paper then in the midst of giving Kerry the full-Gore treatment, that ski vacation and the Kerry tumble made a perfect focus for everything that the Kewl Kid journalist pack found objectionable about the Dem. And communicated a creepy, almost physical loathing for Kerry in the process. You can go back and read our incomparable post (sorry, Bob Somerby!), but here's the nub of it:

Halbfinger's writing rigorously, not to say programmatically, makes Kerry the butt of physical mockery. Every image Halbfinger offers of the candidate is meant to suggest retreat, cowardice, contortion, ineptitude. The article creates an almost subliminal satire on the notion of vacation, using it at every turn as an opportunity to impute physical and by extension moral weakness to Kerry. ... Halbfinger's like the school bully taunting the kid with a limp.

I invite anyone who cares to try the exercise to imagine what Liz Bumiller will tell us about the deep meaning of the Bush spill in her next White House [Love] Letter. And to reflect on the extraordinary lack of decorum that the Times' political hacks are allowed so long as it's a Democrat in the cross-hairs.

posted by michael  12:16:54 PM  
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Presence to the story. Jay Rosen has a fine piece up at PressThink, "'The View From Iraq is Getting Narrower Just as Things Are Getting Worse...'" It's as long and thoughtful as Jay's posts usually are, so I can't possibly get to the heart of it in an excerpt. Here's where it begins, though:

"The view from Iraq is getting narrower just as things are getting worse." That's what Howard Kurtz reported Monday. "Growing violence is forcing Western correspondents to change their approach to reporting, restrict their travel and pass up stories that are now deemed too risky." ... The reality Kurtz describes—journalists pushed back and pinned down, dependent for protection upon the government they are trying to hold accountable—not only tells us something about dangers in Iraq. It forces us to understand the American military effort, and the American press effort as one thing. "More journalists have resumed traveling with military units through the Pentagon's embedding program, which proved so popular during the war against Saddam Hussein," Kurtz reported.

Rosen notes that the Times' John Burns was held by al-Mahdi militia last month for eight hours, and that his associate Jeffrey Gettleman was abducted the next day. And that prompts his central question: "What are these people--journalists on assignment in Iraq--actually there to do, and why do they do it at such high personal risk?"

I offered a comment to Jay's piece—with some trepidation, when people like Max Frankel had commented before me on the same thread—and since it relates to a recent post of my own I thought I'd cross-post it here:

Placing a reporter on the ground—in difficult or perilous circumstances—is not I think primarily about fact-gathering. A reporter's physical presence to the story in a place like Iraq both states and promotes an ethical commitment: one that stems, ultimately, from the knowledge that we never observe merely, without being implicated in what we observe. (We don't just observe, in other words, we witness.) I've never been a journalist, but as a reader it seems to me that the phenomenon of "presence to the story" has deep consequences for the formation of a correspondent's self-awareness. In the best cases (I'm thinking at the moment of James Bennet's beautiful piece in the Times yesterday), the product—the writerly product—offers layered testimony to the correspondent's own interests, to the journalistic agenda more broadly, and to the inevitable dissonance between those agendas and the lived reality of which the correspondent has made himself or herself a part. The result strikes me as honest, about the uses and the limits of journalistic observation, in a way that rarely ever emerges from, say, the journalism of access the makes for standard practice in a paper like the Times. The value of correspondents to me, again as a reader, isn't just that they put eyes and ears and judgement in a place where I can't—it's that their writing offers me a chance to witness with them.

A commenter up-thread had taken strenuous issue with Burns saying that war against Iraq "could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone." I addressed that at the end of my comment:

If what Burns is quoted saying about the justification for war were advocacy, I'd agree with the criticism. But I think what we're talking about in this case is a statement of just the kind of ethical commitment that animates, and has to animate, a journalism of presence. Slipping over into advocacy is one of the risks that sort of journalism runs: but I'll take Burns' version of it, if that's what this is, in a heartbeat over the bad-faith advocacy of some access-peddler like, say, Judith Miller.

posted by michael  5:08:47 PM  
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A map of the abuse. I get the dead-tree edition of the Times delivered daily, as I have for at least a decade now, and it's my primary resource for writing this blog. I was reminded why yesterday, when the paper didn't show up on my doorstep—and had the reminder reinforced with this morning's paper, which was there in its usual place. The physical edition of a newspaper maps an information space: it offers a powerful, subliminal metaphor for the paper's ability to locate individual pieces of information within a global context. (I'm sure I'm half-remembering this point from something of Marshall McLuhan's, but I don't have the energy right now to figure out where I'm half-remembering from.) That's also, incidentally, a powerful, subliminal assertion of hegemony. More to the point now: an extensive, mapped information space, one whose rules and countours you know by habit, has a powerful influence on how you direct your attention. On the Web, a news story is total-immersion: one simply replaces another, and all the page navigation and sidebar links in the world can't alter that central fact. In the physical space of the paper, information doesn't replace information, with each piece completely consuming your attention; the cartography of the page allows each piece of information to contextualize the others, to create a texture of cross-checking and cross-comment that's crucial to the structure of the reading experience. (From this angle, the paper establishes, by a physical correlative, an openness to critique that's paradoxically absent from the more openly structured Web.)

Which is all by way of saying: if you want to really get it in your gut what a dominating story the Abu Ghraib scandal is, grab a copy of today's Times and follow the jump from either of the two front-page stories (Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt, "Dogs and Other Harsh Tactics Linked to Military Intelligence"; Kate Zernicke, "Only a Few Spoke Up on Abuse as Many Soldiers Stayed Silent") to A6. (Much of this burst of coverage, in the case of Jehl/Schmitt's article as well as Steven Lee Myer's horrific accumulation of detainee testimony, is a product of documents from the Army criminal investigation having begun to surface.) There's nothing quite so dramatically contextualizing as two full, facing inner pages devoted to covering about half a dozen angles on a single story—especially in this case, where a chunk of the page real estate is devoted to new abuse photographs on one side, and a graphical map of the "hard site" maintained by the Abu Ghraib interrogators on the other (a map within an information map!).

No detailed dissection of the coverage; it's by-and-large vigorous and worthy. (Even Zernicke's apparently ingrained moralism, which led her to such obtuse reporting last week, is well targeted to her subject today.) The Times was unaccountably slow, slower than the already slow rest of the major American media, to recognize just how shattering and monumental the detainee abuse story was—but if this is the paper playing catchup, then they'll get no complaints from me. Well, for today, at least.

posted by michael  4:48:36 PM  
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Props to Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt for their piece today on the Abu Ghraib interrogation center ("Afghan Policies on Questioning Prisoners Taken to Iraq"). I've been pretty hard on their reporting so far (see here and here for the most recent), so it's in order to say that I think the new article does in fact move the story along, as I've mentioned in the post on Barbara Fast just below.

Love, however, is going to be reserved for James Bennet. He writes in the aftermath of the Israeli raids on the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza ("Children Fill Ledger of Death, No Matter How, or How Many"), and it's the best piece I've seen on A1 since one of Ian Fisher's that I praised at the end of April—like Fisher's piece, about the disputed death of an Iraqi teenager in a firefight, Bennet's is concerned with what war does to young lives, at the same time as he critiques the limits of a reporter's ability to be authoritative in the middle of a war zone. His lead is almost too writerly, too highly colored:

Set in fields of white, pink and red carnations, the giant cooler here, which usually holds vegetables or flowers for sale to an Israeli company, has been turned over to the dead.

Most journalists would be unable to avoid tipping over into sentimentalism from a beginning like this. Part of what keeps Bennet out of that trap, in addition to whatever tools he has, is his clarity about what the issues are, and about the limitations of his own role. He makes his own purposes in being on this scene part of the narrative:

It was to this cooler that, inevitably, the Palestinian doctor came Wednesday morning, when, just as inevitably, the latest Israeli Army raid touched off a parallel struggle to define reality. Were there, in fact, children among the dead, as the Palestinians claimed? How many? Did they die from Israeli sniper fire or from militants' explosives?

The doctor, Ahmed Abu Nikera, had had enough of these questions. In the dank, shadowy room, he yanked and pulled to open the bloodstained white cloth wrapping one of the bodies as tightly as a mummy.

"This is a child," he said, after he revealed the pale gray face of Ibrahim al Qun, 14. "This is the exit wound." He pointed at the ragged, softball-sized black hole where the boy's left eye had been. A sniper's bullet entered at the back of the boy's head, he said.

Still, in the icy book of accounts that one carries to follow this conflict day after day, something else also had to be noted: During the fighting Tuesday night, Dr. Ali Moussa of Al Najar hospital had said there were seven people under the age of 18 among the dead; a list of names and ages compiled by Palestinian hospital officials Wednesday morning showed four people under 18.

"Children Fill Ledger of Death, No Matter How, or How Many"

The arc of Bennet's writing contrasts the absolute fact of these small deaths with his own position, attempting to make an accounting from within what he neatly calls, not simply "the fog of war" but "the war of fog, of often fuzzily presented but always sharply conflicting versions of reality." He rounds the story off brilliantly, by letting the exhaustion of the Palestinian doctor stand in for—but perhaps also, implicitly, criticize—the likely moral exhaustion of the reporter who has failed at his job of tallying up the dead:

As the tumult quieted in Al Najar hospital after the wounded were rushed in Wednesday, an exhausted doctor dropped into a chair, his blue tie loose around his neck.

"It doesn't make any difference," he said of the casualties. "Life equals death, for all of us."

He asked that his name not be published; he was worried that Israel might deny him a permit to travel out of Gaza. In the hallways outside, workers with buckets of water were washing the blood off the crushed-gravel tiles.

Beautiful work.

posted by michael  5:52:27 PM  
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A new name to add to the detainee abuse scandal: Gen. Barbara Fast. She occupies a fairly significant post. From Campbell Brown of NBC News:

With attention focused on the seven soldiers charged with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army’s elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees.

The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the "BIF" is pictured in satellite photos.

According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq’s prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don’t apply, Delta Force’s BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists—but not the most wanted among Saddam’s lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards.

These sources say the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF’s six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he’s drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation. ...

Several top U.S. military and intelligence sources say ... that Donald Rumsfeld, through other top Pentagon officials, directed the U.S. head of intelligence in Iraq, Gen. Barbara Fast, and others to bring some of the methods used at the BIF to prisons like Abu Ghraib, in hopes of getting better intelligence from Iraqi detainees.

"New front in Iraq detainee abuse scandal?"

Crucial questions so far unaddressed in the relatively short NBC report: When exactly was the BIF set up, when was Fast charged with bringing BIF methods to Abu Ghraib (or to "prisons like" it), and what relation if any is there between what Fast was asked to do and Geoffrey Miller's mission last summer? Much of the timeline and the process by which military intelligence took effective charge of the "ordinary" Iraq prisons (as opposed to extraordinary, secret ones like the BIF) remains up in the air; establishing them will be key to understanding what went wrong in the prisons and why, and how high up on the chain responsibility goes.

The BIF would appear not to be the same prison as the one holding "high value detainees" maintained by the Iraq Survey Group, also at Baghdad International, on which Douglas Jehl reported on Monday. Just how many jails have they got at Baghdad International? It's beginning to seem less like an airport than a prison complex with runways.

Update (2 pm): Here's a bit more about Fast. There's a mention of her in the Taguba report, which has her as the senior officer (in charge of obstruction, apparently) on a special Detainee Release Board:

The release process for [detainees accused of committing "Crimes Against the Coalition"] is a screening by the local US Forces Magistrate Cell and a review by a Detainee Release Board consisting of BG Karpinski, COL Marc Warren, SJA, CJTF-7, and MG Barbara Fast, C-2, CJTF-7. MG Fast is the "Detainee Release Authority" for detainees being held for committing crimes against the coalition. According to BG Karpinski, this category of detainee makes up more than 60% of the total detainee population, and is the fastest growing category. However, MG Fast, according to BG Karpinski, routinely denied the board’s recommendations to release detainees in this category who were no longer deemed a threat and clearly met the requirements for release. According to BG Karpinski, the extremely slow and ineffective release process has significantly contributed to the overcrowding of the facilities.

As of April 2003, Fast was second in command of the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Writing in the Nation, Jason Vest calls out some testimony from Gen. Keith Alexander, chief of Army military intelligence, who mentions a program called "Intel Support to Combating Terrorism" conducted at Fort Huachuca, that "uses the lessons learned from Guantanamo to our folks in Afghanistan and Iraq." Vest reports on a February article in the Fort Huachuca base newspaper, describing the program as "a crash course for military intelligence officers bound ... for Guantanamo" that "will quickly become 'globally oriented,' as 'the threat is not just in Afghanistan, it's also in the Philippines and the Middle East.'" Vest also quotes an ABC interview with "two former Fort Huachuca interrogation trainees who said that since early last year, 'The US military has been teaching future interrogators how to cause physical pain while questioning detainees but remain technically within limits set by the Geneva Conventions.'"

Was Fast involved with the "Intel Support to Combating Terrorism" program? In the NYT today, Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt report on a classified interrogation center at Abu Ghraib, the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, which they say "was run by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and that had taken to Iraq the aggressive rules and procedures it had developed for the Afghan conflict." The center seems to have operated on its own set of interrogation rules, "which were inconsistent with those later issued for Iraq by the top American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez," say Jehl and Schmitt. They note, in something of an aside, that the JIDC was "formally established in September" of last year by none other than Gen. Barbara Fast. Was that Afghanistan MI unit [519 MI battalion] Huachuca-trained?

posted by michael  12:22:50 PM  
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Where's the Judy Miller firing squad? I generally avoid the "hey-look-at-this" post, but since I haven't seen any of the bigger blogs direct attention to it—the excellent Jonathan Landay, for Knight-Ridder, adds another to the tally of WMD lies, and INC-proferred disinformation:

The Bush administration helped rally public and congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he showed deception in a lie detector test and had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run effort to trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S. officials told Knight Ridder. ...

The White House used Saeed's claims in a background paper nine months after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as unreliable.

"White House released claims of defector deemed unreliable by CIA"

That paper, by the way, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," was released in Sept. 2002 to provide support for a Bush speech before the U.N. General Assembly; Landay calls it "the administration's first major compendium of 'specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions over the past decade.'" Landay further notes that the paper is still available at White House and State Dept. websites. He leaves it open to question whether the White House knowingly repeated discredited defector information in this case, or simply managed to overlook the fact that Saeed al Haideri had been tainted by U.S. intelligence.

Shall we add that this is also another nail, a great big one, in the coffin of Judith Miller's pre-war reporting? Miller was set up on a date with Haideri by the INC in late 2001, resulting in a splashy front-page Dec. 20 report ("Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms"—sorry, unable to retrieve an article link), one of those flagged by Slate's Jack Shafer last year as in need of "revision, redaction, or retraction." Landay notes the article, which the White House background paper cites as its source for Haideri's claims (thus completing a neat circuit), but is too polite to mention Miller by name. He's also too polite to mention a Miller article written Jan. 24, 2003, almost two years later ("Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say"), that flogs Haideri as a source for important intelligence about Iraqi chemical/biological weapons labs being hidden beneath hospitals and presidential palaces. Which is especially interesting, seeing that Haideri was in the process of being given the heave-ho by American spooks even before Miller's Dec. 2001 article was published:

The article appeared three days after CIA and DIA experts dismissed Saeed as unreliable—after he showed deception in the CIA-administered lie detector test, said the U.S. officials.

CIA experts conducted the polygraph at the request of DIA officials who'd spent some eight hours questioning Saeed in the Thai resort of Pataya prior to his interview with The New York Times, they said.

The polygraph "raised doubts" about Saeed's credibility, said one senior U.S. official. Said the second official: "The results were not good for him."

After the test, the CIA flew Saeed out of Thailand and resettled him in a country of his choice, said the senior U.S. official. He declined to identify the country but said it wasn't the United States and that Saeed wasn't admitted to a U.S. witness protection program.

The boys seem to have kept Haideri around just long enough for him to do his song-and-dance in front of Judy Miller before booting him.

It's one thing to see Miller played for a dupe within a few days of her source being discredited. But a harder question has to be asked: What, if anything, did Miller know about Haideri's status in 2003, when she reported an assessment from "intelligence officials" that made Haideri a source of "some of the most valuable information" about Iraqi weapons programs? Ironically, that later piece is specifically a review of the issue of defector credibility, written largely to support the claims of neo-cons (she quotes Richard Perle and David Albright, among others) that the CIA had proven too globally skeptical of defector-provided intelligence. It's amazing to see Miller ending the article with the claim that Haideri's "interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases." And yet Landay reports now that it was one of those very DIA interviews, two years earlier, that prompted a call to the CIA for the fatal polygraph tests. And got Haideri booted into whatever limbo he currently occupies. Miller's report of the DIA's faith in Haideri is not just demonstrably untrue—it had been untrue for two full years. How can she have failed to learn that?

Update (5/21): I didn't notice before posting this that Jack Shafer, in his Tuesday "Press Box" column in Slate, had written about the significance of Landay's article for the question of Miller's WMD journalism ("Surrender, Judith Miller! Knight Ridder has the goods on you"). Shafer doesn't connect the last dot, to the 2003 Haideri article, which to my mind is the most damning single piece of evidence yet accusing Miller of bad faith. But Landay's report of itself fully satisfies him that the Times can't continue to avoid an accounting for the scandal of Miller's work.

Update 2 (5/21): Enduring Friedman usefully posts the text of Miller's Dec. 20, 2001 article here.

posted by michael  2:24:43 PM  
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The Century 21 agents will be viewed as liberators! I noticed a couple of days ago that Steven R. Weisman was busying himself generating murk about the (already murky enough) Iraq "sovereignty" handoff, when admirable clarity had already been achieved in a Wall Street Journal report, detailing arrangements that will maintain Americans in effective control of "Iraqi" ministries, that Weisman studiously ignored. The Times' Christopher Marquis has an A14 piece today that constitutes official NYT notice of—not the WSJ report itself, God forbid, but of its subject ("U.S. Advisers to Stay in Iraq After June 30"), which is now an allowable topic since the Administration has gone public with it. (If they were motivated in that decision by the WSJ story, the Times sure as hell ain't gonna say.) What the WSJ failed to notice, Marquis seems to imply, was the degree to which caring motivates the policy:

About 200 American and international advisers will continue to work at 26 Iraqi ministries as consultants after the June 30 transfer of authority to Iraq, Bush administration planners said Wednesday.

"We want the Iraqis to understand that we are not abandoning them," said Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone, who is managing the transition for the State Department. He spoke at a briefing sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace.

Awwww ... And they think we're just in it for the torture and sexual humiliation ...

Marquis notes that after the "transfer of power," the American authorities "plan to retain control of numerous buildings within the so-called Green Zone," and that the area "will probably remain cordoned off, with checkpoints run by members of the multinational force." As Eric Umansky, in Slate's "Today's Papers" column, writes:

The piece reads like a mix between an administration press release ... and a Real Estate section dispatch: "It is still unclear whether the administration will try to buy or rent the properties it now occupies or otherwise negotiate a deal with Iraq."

But then, in these uncertain economic times, don't we all face the rent-or-buy question?

What is clear is that, when it comes to issues of personnel, security, and communcations, as well as real estate, as Ricciardone admits "many of their solutions [will] be improvised at the last minute." Also clear, again from Ricciardone, is that "the embassy [will] rely on outside contractors, at significant expense, to provide security in the Green Zone. ... Privileges and immunities for the contract workers have yet to be resolved." (Does that last line mean we are sort of still in it for the torture and sexual humiliation?) None of this lifts Marquis out of his deadpan, nor does he stir to note that the use of contractors to provide security is already an established aspect of the Green Zone operation. For myself, I'm glad to see that not much has changed yet in the neo-con playbook. Improvisation has worked so well up to now in Iraq.

posted by michael  10:33:13 AM  
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Make the reader work for it. Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt are above the fold again today, this time reporting on the military's initial response to the Red Cross's November working paper that detailed abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Army officials in Iraq responded late last year to a Red Cross report of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by trying to curtail the international agency's spot inspections of the prison, a senior Army officer who served in Iraq said Tuesday.

After the International Committee of the Red Cross observed abuses in one cellblock on two unannounced inspections in October and complained in writing on Nov. 6, the military responded that inspectors should make appointments before visiting the cellblock. That area was the site of the worst abuses.

"Officer Says Army Tried to Curb Red Cross Visits to Prison in Iraq"

That's a provocative lead, and contains information missing from the parallel story by Greg Jaffe and David Cloud in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only; Brad DeLong excerpts it here)—namely, that a letter of Dec. 24 responding to ICRC complaints, which the military has previously characterized as evidence of its promptness in addressing the abuse reports, actually represents a coverup effort. And yet Jehl and Schmitt basically go nowhere with what they have.

My quick distillation of the story is much clearer than what Jehl and Schmitt themselves write, and it took me several passes through the fog of their prose to get to it. [The word "coverup," in particular, occurs nowhere in the piece. Even the fact that it's the December response letter that curtailed ICRC access to Abu Ghraib has to be pieced together from widely separated paragraphs.] As is so often the case in the Times, what's actually placed before us is a series of disjointed assertions without intellectual or narrative center; once the writers get to Janis Karpinski, who (like the WSJ reporters) they interviewed for the piece, they drift away from the real point to wondering what degree of responsibility Karpinski herself may have had for the letter of response. (The Times always prefers to focus as low on the chain of command as it can plausibly manage to.) Compare the clarity of the WSJ report, the way it takes hold of the story (qua story), and its chain-of-command implications, dead center:

The Red Cross report came during the same period in which Gen. Sanchez transferred control of Abu Ghraib from Gen. Karpinski to an Army military intelligence commander, in part to improve the collection of intelligence on the growing Iraqi insurgency. According to Gen. Karpinski, the Red Cross report was addressed to her but was "intercepted" by more senior officials. She said the first time she learned about the report was when she was summoned to the late November meeting with Gen. Wojdakowski and Col. Marc Warren, the top legal adviser to Gen. Sanchez, to discuss a response. Gen. Karpinski said at that meeting she was told by Col. Warren "not to worry about the response because his officers were working on the response for my review." That was the meeting at which officers expressed disbelief in the allegations, Gen. Karpinski says.

In a single paragraph Jaffe and Cloud synthesize the story in a way that seems beyond the power of Jehl and Schmitt. Maybe they're just better writers. Maybe a culture of laziness, and an instinctive avoidance of the jugular, vitiates any investigative work that Times Washington reporters might undertake. But we know how uncomfortable the Times is with systemic explanations, don't we?

posted by michael  12:12:32 PM  
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Working the margins. I want to be able to give Douglas Jehl credit for his reporting on the Iraqi detainee-abuse scandal, really I do. He's appeared several times this past week on or around A1 with something on the topic (Saturday, on Camp Cropper, yesterday on the high-level Iraqis held by the Iraq Survey Group): perhaps competitive pressure is starting to concentrate some minds at the Times. But I'm afraid his article today ("M.P.'s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees," with Eric Schmitt) is all hat, no cattle.

Basically, Jehl and Schmitt got somebody (an unnamed "government official") to read to them from portions of the as-yet classified Taguba report (the full report; the executive summary is public and available here, for reference) containing statments made by Col Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the Wiesbaden-based 205th Military Intelligence brigade that's at the heart of the Abu Ghraib investigation. The writers do what they can to pump up the volume on their exclusive:

The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police.

Nice effort, guys, but what's "confirmed" here is, after all, what's already been extensively reported elsewhere, not to mention summarized in the conclusions of the Taguba report itself. Whatever "insights" can be gleaned from Pappas, they hardly reach as far into the matter as Seymour Hersh and others have already done. For all Schmitt and Jehl's huffing, the Times continues merely to work the margins of a story that it appears to have no means of actually advancing.

In fact, it always seems to be one step forward and one step back when the Times takes on the abuse scandal. Schmitt and Jehl don't focus on the central question of chain-of-command; in typical Times fashion, they artlessly munge together the Pappas thing with reporting on a largely unrelated legal issue, about whether or not Geneva Conventions protections were or weren't in play in Iraq. And blow that discussion by producing an entirely unwarranted if not back-asswards conclusion:

In deciding not to invoke the unlawful combatant designation on any prisoners in Iraq, the Bush administration appears to have concluded that detention and interrogation procedures permitted under the Geneva Conventions were adequate even for suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq. ...

That new approach is a sharp reversal from the one that Pentagon officials described after the major phase of the war in Iraq ended last May. Then, American officers said that the thousands of prisoners in Iraq were being sorted to determine who among them should be labeled unlawful combatants. ... On Monday, however, a senior military officer said in an e-mail message that "no persons in Iraq have been declared unlawful combatants." The Iraqi prisoners held in the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib have been labeled security detainees. In testimony addressing the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners there, American officials have said that the Geneva accords are "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.

Did the Administration decide that Geneva Conventions-permitted interrogation procedures were "adequate" for Iraq, and the global standard for prisoner treatment there? If that was policy—became policy in the aftermath of combat, as Schmitt and Jehl imply—then that would tend significantly to limit exposure to the scandal at the higher levels of civilian leadership. But isn't it equally likely—more, given what we know from Sy Hersh and Newsweek—that the Pentagon simply dispensed with the arduous administrative task of sifting through all its Iraqi detainees to determine who got "unlawful combatant" status? And gave itself, in the bargain, a freer hand to move detainees through whatever interrogation regimes military intelligence (or others) decided would prove useful? There's a standpoint, after all—especially when you assume your own absolute impunity—from which the notion of explicitly offering lawful-combatant status may seem a bit too restrictive of your freedom.

Though Schmitt and Jehl seem to have pre-empted the question, it's possible they've noticed something important to the story here. They might make some real progress if they jettison their assumption about what the Administration "appears to have concluded" and focus instead on who decided, and when, to abandon the policy of identifying and segregating "unlawful combatant" detainees in Iraq.

posted by michael  4:42:39 PM  
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Jodi Wilgoren campaigns for early retirement. Jodi Wilgoren's on the kind of roll that, at a paper with editorial standards, would have relegated her by now to covering parades and debutante balls.

The high point—the high point!—of Wilgoren's recent activity is her shocking exposé about the guy who makes John Kerry's PBJ sandwiches. (Can we really entrust this country to a man who eats 'em hippie-style, on whole wheat with—O, the humanity!—strawberry jelly? The Howler does its usual exemplary service on the article here.) Since then, she's popped up of a Saturday recapping a two-month old fake controversy, with no news hook or other sign of relevance in sight; last Saturday she and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wishfully tried to gin up a role for John McCain as Kerry's VP choice out of something like the whole cloth. (Bloomberg, by the way, reported yesterday that McCain has "'categorically' ruled out running for vice president with Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in November"—thus putting paid to Wilgoren's Veep fantasy in embarrassingly quick fashion. Think Jodi'll take official notice, or has she already sailed on?)

I've been largely avoiding the Wilgoren follies lately—out of concern for my own sanity, and because eRobin at Fact-esque has bravely taken on the Wilgoren Watch duties herself—but today's thing with David Rosenbaum ("Kerry Feeling for Footing on Country's Role in Iraq") just can't be ignored. It engages—rather, pretends to engage—a meaningful question of campaign strategy: the extent to which the situation in Iraq, even as it damages Bush, requires delicacy of management on Kerry's part. (Josh Marshall actually does engage, productively, with that question at TPM today.)

Senator John Kerry, on his way to a rally here with Howard Dean, who battered him for months for voting in favor of invading Iraq, acknowledged Monday afternoon that he was navigating a fine line on how to deal with the deepening crisis in Iraq.

"It's a dangerous situation," Mr. Kerry told reporters on his campaign plane. "You have to give the president some room to get things done, but if he doesn't do what he has to do ..."

His voice trailed off, and then Mr. Kerry added, "It's a very difficult thing, but I think the president has to lead. Really lead."

So how does Kerry plan to negotiate that difficult space between giving the President room and demanding that he lead—really lead? If you think Wilgoren and Rosenbaum are going to tell you—hey, buddy, you've been punked. Having quoted Kerry in their lead, they proceed to entirely ignore the substance of the quote, and the direction in which it seems to point, to write an article about—get this—the Nader challenge!

Heading into the general election campaign, Mr. Kerry now must try to benefit from the rise in antiwar sentiment or at least block Ralph Nader from doing so. ... Mr. Nader said in an interview on Monday that the growing opposition in this country to what is going on in Iraq—the mounting death toll, the prisoner abuse scandal, the beheading of Nicholas E. Berg—would translate into votes for him unless Mr. Kerry changed course.

"Kerry has to have an exit strategy," Mr. Nader said. "There's no light at the end of his tunnel."

Unbelievably, that's the entire article. Never mind the, er, elephant in the room: what Kerry really has to concentrate on, say our astute Professional Political Reporters, is Ralph Nader's fantasy-league candidacy and the votes it might, under a proper alignment of the stars, manage to steal from him. Never mind that every statement of fact in the article, every reported Democratic opinion, refutes them. (It's a bizarrely self-canceling piece.) Wilgoren and Rosenbaum have built themselves a hobby-horse, and by God nothing's going to keep them from enjoying a nice little ride.

Jodi Wilgoren is pleading to be given an early retirement. Will no one at the NY Times hear her cry?

posted by michael  3:10:59 PM  
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Situation unclear. Try again later. To Steven R. Weisman, writing an inner-page "Diplomatic Memo" today, just who's going to exercise authority in Iraq after the magic date of June 30 is a big big mystery ("Transfer Date Is Clear, but Not Much Else Is"). His article gives the impression of one manfully struggling through a sea of murk—but at least we can have faith that somewhere there's a "game plan":

American officials say all the uncertainties are a necessary byproduct of the plan to let Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy in Iraq, choose the new Iraqi leadership.

The American game plan is to let that "caretaker government," which is to stay in power until elections early next year, negotiate the definition of its own powers, in discussions with the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council, with the active participation of Arab nations in the region. ...

The justification for letting the new government negotiate its own powers is that it would look bad to the world if the limits on Iraqi sovereignty seemed to be imposed from without.

"Any limitations on Iraqi authority are going to have to come from the Iraqis themselves," a top administration policy maker said. "I don't see how you could do it any other way."

I'm thinking Mr. Weisman could have unconfused himself to a degree if he'd had a look at this little article, which appeared last week on the front page of an obscure rag known as the Wall Street Journal: "Behind the Scenes, U.S. Tightens Grip On Iraq's Future: Hand-Picked Proxies, Advisers Will Be Given Key Roles In Interim Government," by Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper.

As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.

In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.

In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan.

[Thanks to Altercation for the link.]

How does Weisman manage an entire article about the Iraq sovereignty handover without reference to any of the allegations in the WSJ piece? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps he's just more comfortable with fog, and official fictions, than with an unapproved storyline.

posted by michael  5:39:31 PM  
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Judith Miller Rules. I wasn't especially surprised that the Times failed to lead yesterday with an account of Sy Hersh's latest mortar blast in the New Yorker—though the piece that did get picked to lead, Kate Zernicke et al's taunting exercise about the Abu Ghraib MPs now under investigation, was a pretty sorry choice to take its place. I wasn't even that surprised that the paper's summary of Hersh's charges got buried back on A12: unfortunate, but par for the course. I'd have hoped, though, that the Times at least wouldn't actively assist the Administration in playing its non-denial denial games with Hersh—but you know what? ...

The lead focuses where it ought, on the special access program (SAP) that authorized detainee abuse and on its bureaucratic sponsors:

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda, allowing these methods to be used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to an article in The New Yorker.

The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reported that Mr. Rumsfeld and Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.

David Johnston and Tim Golden, "Rumsfeld and Aide Backed Harsh Tactics, Article Says"

Actually, the second graf here already goes a bit astray: nowhere does Hersh suggest that Rumsfeld and Cambone actually "approved"—in the sense of having reviewed and authorized—"use of the tougher interrogation techniques." (It's a mistake that chimes with Lawrence Di Rita's artfully askew rejection, reported at the end of the article, of the notion that any "responsible official" in the DoD was "involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.") The abusive techniques were brought to Iraq by Geoffrey "Gitmo" Miller, and authorized in some as-yet opaque process through the coalition chain of command. Expanding the SAP, as Hersh notes, is a different thing, "a step further" from Miller's mission to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib—but also presumably a step taken safely behind the barrier of plausible deniability. (The rules for SAP operatives, in the words of one Hersh source, are "Grab whom you must. Do what you want." Rummy and Cambone knew exactly what they were buying when they sicked the SAP on Iraqi detainees—same as with dispatching Miller, really—and they got it without having to put their names on any directive that would have explicitly authorized torture.)

The really juicy red herring comes after the writers have finished summarizing Hersh.

On Saturday, officials in the Bush administration disputed several of the critical details of Mr. Hersh's article. They said that they were aware of no high-level decision to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.

A military official who worked in Iraq on detention issues said on Saturday that a covert task force of military and intelligence officers had operated in Iraq, but that it had appeared to limit its contact with the jailers at Abu Ghraib. The official said that the covert operators worked out of their own highly secret and well-guarded compound in Baghdad, where they held captives incommunicado and questioned them for relatively short periods of time before turning them over to the jailers at Abu Ghraib.

"They had their own mission," the official said. "They picked up their own people. They were operating under their own rules. So we had nothing to do with that. It would have been a huge security violation for anyone else to be in there."

The official said the group was no longer working in Iraq.

The official said the Baghdad compound where the team worked was so closely controlled that other military and intelligence personnel could not enter it without having clearance or the authorization of the commander of American forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez. ... The official said that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the commander of the military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, visited the covert compound last September, during a trip to assess the problems with detention and interrogation efforts in Iraq. General Miller was accompanied by a detention expert, who made suggestions about the security of the compound.

Let's parse this. Somebody in the administration, charged with rebutting the Hersh article (Di Rita?), puts Johnston and Golden in touch with a "military official who worked in Iraq on detention issues," someone whose comments suggest he held a position at Abu Ghraib. He dutifully gives the word about a "covert task force" (now safely out of Iraq, if not out of business) that had minimal contact with the Abu Ghraib system. The obvious intent, as the highlighted passages indicate, is to suggest that the source is describing the SAP in Iraq, and that Hersh has gotten it wrong about the expansion of the SAP to Abu Ghraib.

And it won't fly. For starters, odds are the source isn't describing a SAP operation. Hersh reports that Geoffrey Miller wasn't "read in" to the SAP, which is extremely closely guarded, until "sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public"—presumably after the Taguba investigation began. So what was he doing touring a SAP compound in September—along with another "detention expert"? And how does this source know about the operation, unless he himself is in the SAP—and if that's the case, is it likely he'd be talking about it at all? To quote Hersh again, "The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. 'If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances,' the former official said."

What's more, even if this is a SAP operation, what Johnston and Golden report is scarcely dispositive, as the lawyers say. The presence of the SAP at its own, secure Baghdad compound doesn't preclude the program having been expanded in the way Hersh describes. In fact, the two have nothing to do with each other: Hersh reports that Cambone decided to "bring the SAP's rules into the prisons" and to "bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices"—not to physically link any existing SAP operation to Abu Ghraib. Moreover, the decision to expand the SAP came after the initial decision to set up a black interrogation apparatus inside Iraq, as a consequence of the jails having been full of detainees that the black-ops guys couldn't get to. Hersh portrays that decision as an act of overreaching, and/or administrative desperation, that unraveled what was emerging as a successful, limited use of SAP on high-level detainees.

If I can see these problems with Johnston and Golden's anonymous source, it's a cinch that Johnston and Golden ought to have seen them. But they appear to be following Judith Miller Rules: in which it's a reporter's job merely to transcribe what officials say, without being so gauche as to subject it to analysis. Nice to see that the whole WMD debacle still hasn't taught them skepticism at the Times.

posted by michael  1:04:27 PM  
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God bless Seymour Hersh. His latest New Yorker piece, just posted, is here. Looks like Stephen Cambone is, indeed, at the very center of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Hersh describes a logic behind the appearance of a torture policy in the Iraq gulag very similar to the one I sketched out, speculatively, last week: what brings it all together is the intersection of that logic (growing insurgency, vulnerability of forces to attack, inadequacy of human intelligence resources) with the opportunity presented by the black world of Special Access Programs, quick-reaction intelligence operations that are essentially placed outside the law and outside the normal chain of command. An opportunity as much about the bureaucracy as it is about the war in Iraq or the war on terror, according to Hersh:

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. ...

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. ... Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. ...

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further: ... they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets"—prisoners in Iraqi jails—"than people who can handle them."

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the SAP's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices

As one of the article's intelligence sources says, "We've never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War." Another precedent-shattering triumph for BushCo. Everything has indeed changed since 9/11.

There's much, much more—including the fact that those "civilian contractors" can be expected, in many instances, to be not civilians at all but government personnel in the black program. With every line he prints, Hersh gives the Terra Administration less and less ground to stand on. May the whole immoral, unAmerican edifice come crashing down.

posted by michael  4:18:19 PM  
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Better a torturer than a rat? In a comment on the previous post, Ben Brackley alerts us to another story from Kate Zernicke (writing with Adam Liptak and Michael Moss) about the Abu Ghraib MP defendants, which we'll no doubt be enjoying in tomorrow's print edition ("Accused G.I.'s Try to Shift Blame in Prison Abuse"). Zernicke et al. seem, as Ben says, "determined to avoid the main story, which is not the guilt or innocence of these particular soldiers, but rather the shared culpability of MI, the command structure and the cultural enviornment created at the prison by the disdain for international legal conventions in the Administration's conduct of the 'war on terror.'" Detemined is right—they're going to some lengths to change the topic.

The story begins oddly, with what might seem a throwaway human-interest detail:

Six of the defendants in the Abu Ghraib abuse case once bunked together in a tent in Baghdad. But as the most important military prosecutions since Vietnam unfold this week, each soldier is struggling to explain away seemingly irrefutable evidence captured in frame after frame of disturbing images, and they are pointing fingers at one another, minimizing their roles and blaming the government. ...

The defendants' challenge is to convince military courts that the pictures of abusive treatment of Iraqi detainees, which have generated a storm of criticism, do not begin to tell the whole story. Each has a personal version of events but one theme unites them: they contend they were following orders.

The point, apparently, is that in trying to save their hides the defendants are lapsing from proper soldierly solidarity, and that this compromises anything they may have to say about command structure. [A propos of which: still no mention of the MSNBC-published photograph showing military intelligence personnel surrounding a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.] The presumption seems to be that there's something illegitimate and dishonorable about these court-martialed soldiers defending themselves: they're not being tried as a group, of course, and the article acknowledges that "the cases against the soldiers ... are quite different," but what we're supposed to take away from that is that the process is causing the defendants to "turn on one another." Towards the end of the longish piece, the lead's tent conceit reappears, this time in the key of smarm:

Two weeks ago, Specialist Sivits abruptly left the tent in Baghdad he had shared with five other defendants, scrawling a farewell note that said he was moving "to benefit everyone." But he was moving mainly for his own benefit, going from bunkmate to witness against his compatriots in exchange for leniency, according to lawyers in the case. It is unclear how many of the defendants are still sharing the tent.

Wipe away a tear as you contemplate that emptied tent, bereft of its former band of brothers. What a sad symbol of broken faith! Liptak/Moss/Zernicke are a bit too decorous to say it outright, of course, but it seems they believe Spc. Sivits is a rat, and a selfish one to boot: though I wonder if they've quite thought through their little exercise in pious disdain. Where exactly is the dishonor in cooperating with a prosecution that aims to take down a ring of torturers? You might want to recalibrate your moral scale, there, Kate.

While we're on the topic, though, let me address a problem in my own writing. It's a naive error to attribute simple, coherent intentions to a complex collaborative product like a newspaper. I made that mistake yesterday when I identified the (very real) shortcomings in Kate Zernicke's article on the Sivits statements with a "line" being promulgated by the Times, and suggested that it indicated a "desire" on the part of the paper to hustle the abuse story off the front page. [Today's A1, which leads like all the major papers with the announcement that Centcom has now barred most coercive interrogations, adds a Douglas Jehl piece that tries to advance the story by focusing on the Camp Cropper detention center, a focus of ICRC reporting in the middle of last year. I don't give the piece especially high marks—Jehl's never demonstrated any particular ability to synthesize reporting, as he's asked to do here, and his leading idea that Camp Cropper "served as an incubator" for the abuses that would follow at Abu Ghraib isn't borne out anywhere in what follows. But it's an honest attempt and puts the lie to my overstatement yesterday.] Various people with various agendas push at each other on a daily basis to produce A1, and for an outsider it's almost impossible to discern which of those agendas is being expressed, and how, at any given moment. And it's much more to the point, anyway, to think about the politics that A1 itself creates, rather than the politics that creates it. My basic point, about the "undertow" of Establishment liberalism and the way it coverage on A1 is biased in that direction, remains valid—I was kind of hasty though in the way I expressed it.

posted by michael  2:29:52 PM  
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Jumping to conclusions. Two sworn statements from Spc. Jeremy Sivits, the Abu Ghraib MP who has offered a guilty plea in his court martial and is cooperating with military investigators, were released yesterday by a lawyer for one of the other guards charged in the case, and the big three papers (LAT here, WaPo here) all feature them. Among them, only the NYT's Kate Zernicke ("Accused Soldier Paints Scene of Eager Mayhem at Iraqi Prison") feels compelled to embellish the story with a line of interpretive patter.

Give Zernicke credit: by crafting a coherent narrative out of Sivits' account of an abuse party in late October (one that seems to have been the source of most of the first round of photos), she makes her piece by far the most compelling read of the three. [Incidentally, the descriptive slug the Times places over the article, "The Whistle-Blower," is completely inaccurate. The whistleblower in the Abu Ghraib case was Spc. Joseph Darby; Sivits' only claim to fame here is that he started singing as soon as criminal investigators got to him following Darby's complaint.] But this is the Times, and this is A1, so narrative art isn't sufficient: the story has to have a Takeaway, something that'll focus the reader's mind. And since this is the Times, and A1, it's a cinch that the takeaway's going to conform to a good, Pravda-style party line.

Specialist Sivits's two statements ... recount the evening's activities in graphic but unemotional language, portraying a night of gratuitous and random violence. Lawyers for the soldiers have explained the abuse captured in hundreds of photographs now at the center of the Abu Ghraib scandal by saying the soldiers were operating on the orders of military intelligence in an effort to get detainees to talk. ...

But Specialist Sivits described a scene of twisted joviality not authorized by anyone in the chain of command and with no connection to any interrogations. ...

Specialist Sivits was asked if the abuse would have happened if someone in the chain of command was present. "Hell no," he replied, adding: "Because our command would have slammed us. They believe in doing the right thing. If they saw what was going on, there would be hell to pay."

Shabby work. It's hard to believe that Zernicke isn't deliberately confusing the issue with this. She's playing it so that Sivits' statement puts the lie to the notion that "soldiers were operating on the orders of military intelligence": as if the reported abuse were entirely self-directed, an especially brutal form of unauthorized hazing (a word Zernicke doesn't use, though "twisted joviality" puts us firmly in that territory). [Notice how Zernicke assigns the idea that abuse was ordered by MI to lawyers for the other accused soldiers, to compromise it rhetorically.] But the absence of Sivits' "chain of command"—his direct supervisors, such as the platoon sergeant he mentions who angrily orders the fun to stop, only to have it recommence when the sergeant leaves a couple of minutes later—doesn't remotely go to demonstrate the uninvolvement of military intelligence, the conclusion Zernicke tries to twist out of it. Nor does the fact that the abuse party in question occurred without connection to an interrogation—in fact, the notion that MPs were suborned to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation means we should expect that abuse from MPs would have occured outside of the interrogation setting. [Meanwhile, MSNBC has already released a photograph, provided by the attorney of the MP ringleader, Charles Graner, that purports to show several MI officers standing with Graner around a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners. Which would tend to kind of undercut your conclusion, wouldn't it, Kate? Thanks to Atrios for the link.]

No surprise, I guess, that A1 would try to do damage control on this for Rummy and crew. The Establishment liberal's instinct, always to take the most anodyne and power-friendly tack possible until forced otherwise, operates at the Times like an undertow, pulling major stories like the detainee-abuse scandal insistently toward calmer waters. The "bad apples" line is so transparently where A1 wants the story to end up: you can practically feel Bill Keller's impatience to get this latest investigation-thing comfortably relegated to the back pages where it belongs.

posted by michael  1:54:12 PM  
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The two faces of Gen. Sanchez. Here's a riddle that's been perplexing me: how is it that the general who orders multiple investigations into detainee abuse in the Iraq gulag, the second (and most crucial) of them led by someone as tough-minded and ethically independent as Antonio Taguba, is the same man who issues orders that systematize those abuses and give over control of the prisons to the interrogators? Is Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, coalition military commander in Iraq, schizophrenic? Bottomlessly cynical? In his latest New Yorker article about the Abu Ghraib scandal, Seymour Hersh assumes that Sanchez is at fault for helping to maintain and cover up the abuse policy, but his story doesn't do anything to address or resolve the strangeness of a commander who promotes abuse ordering—repeatedly—that his own interrogation system be subject to investigation.

The questions may only relate to Sanchez himself, in which case they're just a sidelight on the real story, but I've been wondering if there's anything larger here. To focus (if not resolve) my perplexity, I put together a Sanchez-related timeline (some of it culled from an AP timeline), up through the launch of the Taguba investigation:

• March - November 2003. The International Committee of the Red Cross visits coalition prisons in Iraq. According to the ICRC, it "regularly" brought its concerns about the treatment of detainees to the attention of coalition military authorities during that period. The NYT notes that "as far back as May of last year, the Red Cross reported to the military about 200 allegations of abuse, and ... in July it complained about 50 allegations of abuse at a detention site called Camp Cropper."
• June 14. Ricardo Sanchez is promoted to Lieutenant General and assumes command of coalition forces in Iraq (Combined Joint Task Force Seven).
• Aug. 31 - Sept. 9. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commandant of the military prison at Guantanamo, is dispatched to Iraq to consult on interrogation and detention procedures. His mission is apparently ordered by Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
• Oct. 12. According to the NYT today, a chart of "approved [interrogation] techniques, entitled the 'Interrogation Rules of Engagement,' was drawn up for American forces in Iraq" by local commanders on the urging of Gen. Miller, and on the model of a "spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques" which had been compiled in Feb. 2003 for the Guantanamo prison.
• Oct. 13 - Nov. 5. Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, provost marshal of the Army, is asked by Gen. Sanchez to investigate the conditions of all U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. According to Seymour Hersh, his report "concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them." [Hersh's second article suggests that Ryder, who as provost was commanding general of all military police forces, including those he was asked to investigate, soft-pedaled his conclusions in order to protect himself bureaucratically.]
• Oct. 19. Gen. Sanchez issues an order relating to approved techniques for interrogations in coalition prisons. This involves the infamous "list of 50 techniques" mentioned by Sen. Levin in his questioning on Tuesday of Stephen Cambone, as published in a still-secret annex to the Taguba report. "The list showed two categories of measures," in the WaPo's account, "those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Among the items in the second category are 'sensory deprivation,' 'stress positions,' 'dietary manipulation,' forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and use of dogs."
• Nov. 19. According to Congressional testimony from Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, Centcom deputy commander, Gen. Sanchez signs an order "putting military police at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq under the control of military intelligence." This apparently begins the period of worst abuses at the prison, and turns the warnings of the Ryder report about separation between the roles of prison guards and interrogators on their head.
• Jan. 13 - 19, 2004. Army Spc. Joseph M. Darby, an MP with the 800th reserve MP brigade at Abu Ghraib, reports cases of abuse at the prison. Three days later, Gen. Sanchez orders a criminal investigation into Darby's allegations; two days after that Sanchez suspends a guard leader and company commander at the prison, and sanctions Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the 800th's commander. (Karpinski was admonished, not relieved of duty, as some reports incorrectly state.) On the 19th, Sanchez orders an administrative investigation into the conduct of the 800th.
• Jan. 31. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of coalition land forces, appoints Gen. Taguba to conduct the new abuse investigation.

So: Gitmo Miller comes in, presumably not at Sanchez's behest, since he was dispatched by Cambone; a month later, exactly as Miller's recommendations are being established as policy for coalition prisons, Sanchez commands Ryder's report; two months after that, Taguba's (to cover the period after the Ryder report and after military intelligence had formally been put in charge in Abu Ghraib). Sanchez isn't just asking that interrogation policy and the role of military intelligence be investigated—he's asking that they be investigated while the system is being put in place.

I've never been in the military, and I've never been a bureaucrat, plus I'm only speculating—so take this for what it's worth. But the picture this timeline paints for me is of a man impaled on a stick, wriggling as hard as he can to get loose from it. Sanchez is being squeezed by his civilian bosses to issue orders on their behalf which, whatever else he thinks of them, he must sense (alerted by the ICRC reports) will send his career straight down the toilet if they ever get out. (It's at least possible, in fact, that those Oct. 19th orders reserving approval of exceptional interrogation techniques to Sanchez are an attempt to mitigate the effects of an intelligence-focused detainee regime. And that the subsequent November orders are intended to force the issue and take even that much management of interrogations out of Sanchez's hands.) Notice, in particular, how Stephen Cambone responds to Sen. Levin, when asked whether Cambone was "personally aware that permissible interrogation techniques in the Iraqi theater included sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs": "No, sir. That list, both in terms of its detail and its exceptions, were approved at the command level in the theater." That sound you hear is Cambone chuckling, while he leaves Gen. Sanchez to twist slowly in the wind.

So Sanchez fights it out the only way he can: he puts reports on the record. While the new intelligence regime is still shaping up, he orders Ryder to investigate the very issue of whether military intelligence should have control of the detainee population. And when that doesn't take, Sanchez jumps—hard and fast—at the next opportunity that presents itself, with Darby's accusations of abuse: and in Taguba gets, perhaps, exactly what he's bargaining for, a tough guy who will report in a way (with a narrower institutional focus, and with less likelihood of a compromising conclusion) that will force the new regime to be substantially modified if not undone. (Almost as if Sanchez had learned a lesson from the failure of his bureaucratic gambit, if that's what it was, assigning the head of military police to report on the conduct of the MPs in Iraq?)

No idea whether this story is true, though I think it's at least plausible. And it has the benefit of making sense of an otherwise incoherent set of moves on Sanchez's part. What's more, if it holds water, it implicates the civilian leadership at the Pentagon—Cambone, and Rumsfeld behind him—just that much more decisively in creating and pushing the Iraq torture policy. Rumsfeld can pretend shock all he likes—I suspect he got at Abu Ghraib exactly the regime he wanted.

posted by michael  5:20:07 PM  
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Hook, line and sinker. Having given his readers a bit of a heads-up yesterday about Rumsfeld henchman Stephen Cambone, Eric Schmitt lets himself get played by same on today's front page. Here's Schmitt's lead:

The Army general who first investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib prison stood by his inquiry's finding that military police officers should not have been involved in conditioning Iraqi detainees for interrogation, even as a senior Pentagon civilian sitting next to him at a Senate hearing on Tuesday disputed that conclusion.

The officer, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it had been against the Army's doctrine for another Army general to recommend last summer that military guards "set the conditions" to help Army intelligence officers extract information from prisoners. He also said an order last November from the top American officer in Iraq effectively put the prison guards under the command of the intelligence unit there.

But the civilian official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, contradicted the general. He said that the military police and the military intelligence unit at the prison needed to work closely to gain as much intelligence as possible from Iraqi prisoners to prevent attacks against American soldiers. Mr. Cambone also said that General Taguba misinterpreted the November order, which he said only put the intelligence unit in charge of the prison facility, not of the military police guards.

"Rumsfeld Aide and a General Clash on Abuse"

Schmitt calls this "unusual sparring between a two-star Army general and one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's most trusted aides," and claims that the tiff "cast a spotlight on the confusing conditions at the prison last fall when the worst abuses occurred." In support of which, he highlights a quote from Ted Kennedy in a one-sentence graf:

"How do you expect the M.P.'s to get it straight if we have a difference between the two of you?" said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

All due respect to Sen. Kennedy, but that's about the dumbest and least productive reaction he could have had. It's ludicrous to conflate a disputed point of interpretation in an Armed Services Committe hearing with command confusion (between the MP reservists and military intelligence) on the ground. And it's more ludicrous still to conflate whatever Gen. Taguba does or doesn't understand—Taguba, who reported after the fact on abuses in the gulag—with Cambone, part of the chain of command that created and condoned the system of detainee abuse. All Kennedy's doing is letting Cambone off the hook.

"Unusual" the sparring may have been, but unusual doesn't necessarily mean interesting, much less meaningful. At least Kennedy has the excuse that he was reacting in the moment. Schmitt, on the other hand, and with every opportunity for reflection, lets himself get distracted by something shiny ("Oooh, look! A public spat!"), in the process ignoring the main, in fact the only question: who is responsible for having determined the policy of abusive interrogations? Cambone's sitting there in plain view, as much an architect of the policy as anyone so far identified, and Schmitt is unable or unwilling to focus on him. More to the point: Schmitt fails to recognize that Cambone has "contradicted" Taguba only nominally, while in fact confirming the underlying issue as Taguba has already identified it, namely that interrogations at Abu Ghraib were structured to serve the purposes of military intelligence. Military intelligence was "in charge of the prison facility" but not in charge of the MP guards? Talk about a distinction without a difference ...

It's not as if Cambone was sent over to appear with Taguba because the Pentagon was committed to forthrightness, to providing as much information as possible. He was there precisely to obscure the issue, and on the evidence of the NYT coverage his phony little disagreement with Taguba did an admirable job of it. Eric Schmitt's responsibility in these hearings isn't to react to personality, as just another spectator: it's to understand the policy stakes and to report them, whatever smoke screen some operative like Cambone tries to cast in front of things. Better luck next time, I guess, Eric.

posted by michael  3:20:55 PM  
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Media terrorists. Via Wonkette:

The release of yet more photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners has sparked a very lively debate about whether the media should have run the pictures to begin with. It turns out they shouldn't have. Kaus explains: See, he believes that "there is a large amorphous group of 'swing voter' Arabs who might support terrorism but who might also be persuaded to live in peace." If you believe that, too, then "you really didn't want these photos published, because they are what will lose us the swing voters and produce the blowback. . . Not only does it follow that the photos are best left unpublished; it also follows that the Pentagon was doing the right thing when it attempted to keep them secret."

"Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: We Blame the Media"

Shorter Mickey Kaus: Insufficiently rigorous media self-censorship causes terrorism.

Shorter shorter Mickey Kaus: Touch, but don't look.

Shorter Mickey Kaus by implication: The best way to promote the cause of free and open society in the Arab world is through a regime of secrecy at home.

{With apologies to Busy Busy Busy.}

posted by michael  12:26:27 PM  
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Toxic consequences II. Missed this WaPo article from Sunday (when I was taking a little sanity break from blogging/surfing): "As Insurgency Grew, So Did Prison Abuse" (Scott Wilson and Sewell Chan). I'll note it now, as it substantiates my last week's speculation about how the creation of a torture policy for the Iraq gulag—determined by the Pentagon's dispatching Gitmo Miller to Iraq last summer—might have mapped to the security situation and to the needs of force protection. (Thanks to Orcinus for pointing out the article.)

Less than two weeks after 1,000 pounds of explosives demolished U.N. headquarters here on Aug. 19, driving the organization from Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was warden of the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists. Miller's mission in Iraq signaled new zeal to organize an intelligence network that could hit back at the insurgents, but through unorthodox means. ...

The worsening war outside the walls of the U.S. prison system in Iraq had a direct bearing on the abuses that occurred inside the facilities, according to Iraqi and American sources. Through the summer and fall of 2003, when detainees at Abu Ghraib prison suffered mistreatment now notorious throughout the world, the security situation in Iraq and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners ran parallel courses, both downward.

U.S. officials were under mounting pressure to collect wartime intelligence but were hobbled by a shortage of troops, the failure to build an effective informant network and a surprisingly skilled insurgency. In response, they turned to the prison system. ...

Interviews with U.S. officials, former prisoners and Iraqis who have supported the occupation, along with findings outlined in the Army's internal investigation of prison abuses, make clear that there was a connection between changes in conditions inside the prisons and the struggle to control an increasingly hostile country.

A crucial article, exactly on point. The Post, by the way, has been absolutely eating the Times' lunch—its breakfast and dinner, too—on the story of the Bush-created gulag. They were as bad as everybody else in the prewar period, but seem to have been stung into an attempt to make up for it now.

posted by michael  11:21:23 AM  
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Stephen Cambone, smoking gun. The most significant article in the Times today is buried on A11; in it, Eric Schmitt notices that Friday's Senate testimony contains the answer to the question I asked last week, namely, who was responsible for sending Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant, to Iraq last summer to make a report on prison interrogation practices? Schmitt also has a good idea why this is important, even if his paper doesn't.

The Pentagon's top intelligence official urged last summer that an Army general be sent to Iraq to review how American military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

But the official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, said he had never advocated a policy of having military guards at the prison soften up prisoners for the interrogators. ...

In impromptu testimony before the Senate committee on Friday, Mr. Cambone explained why General Miller had been sent to Iraq.

"We had then in Iraq a large body of people who had been captured on the battlefield that we had to gain intelligence from for force-protection purposes," said Mr. Cambone, who had been summoned from a group of aides sitting behind Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to respond to a senator's question. "He was asked to go over, at my encouragement, to take a look at the situation as it existed there."

In an unfolding scandal in which most of the focus has been on soldiers or military commanders, the role of Mr. Cambone, as well as of other senior Pentagon officials, in pushing for improved intelligence in Iraq directly links the Defense Department to policies that may have influenced how prison guards and military interrogators carried out their jobs.

"Pentagon Official Says Asking Army to Help Iraq Interrogators Did Not Lead to Prison Abuse"

Cambone is one of the minders that the Defense Department insisted, at the last minute, on having accompany Gen. Antonio Taguba to the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings today. Cambone's post, "under secretary of defense for intelligence," is a post created just a year ago, and bureaucratically is somewhat analogous to Doug Feith's infamous Office of Special Plans that cooked the books on prewar WMD intelligence to suit Donald Rumsfeld's liking. As Schmitt notes at the end of his article:

Since he took on the post as the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Mr. Cambone has been flexing his bureaucratic muscles in what has long been a struggle over intelligence resources between the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, according to current and former intelligence officials.

As a bureaucratic rival to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Mr. Cambone's has placed priority on obtaining intelligence for military commanders. That mission is not always shared by the C.I.A., whose priorities tend to be broader and more strategic.

Here's some background Schmitt doesn't provide in his article. Cambone is a hard-core neocon, with a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont University (the neocon finishing school), a PNACer, a Rumsfeld protege during the Clinton interregnum (identified as staff director of the PNAC's so-called Rumsfeld Commission on ballistic missile defense) and since then has pretty much been sitting on the Rumster's right hand at DoD. Here's an excerpt from his profile on the extremely valuable Right Web, which fleshes out the institutional politics of Cambone's current position:

Before taking over as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in early 2003, Stephen Cambone, considered one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s key aides, served on a number of influential government and nongovernmental defense review studies. He served on both the National Institute for Public Policy’s Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control study team as well as the Project for the New American Century’s 2001 “Rebuilding America’s Defense” report team. Both studies seem to have served as blueprints for the defense policies initiated by the administration of George W. Bush. Cambone also served on two Rumsfeld-chaired studies commissioned by Congress dealing with space weapons and the missile threat to the United States.

When Cambone was tapped to be the first ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence, some observers saw it as a Rumsfeld power grab. According to veteran defense analyst John Prados (Tompaine.com, April 14, 2003), Rumsfeld’s appointment of Cambone "will allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA head George Tenet’s role."

And Disinfopedia quotes a 2002 article from the Weekly Standard (from back when Rummy was still a defense transformation visionary) on Cambone's prior DoD job, as Director of the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (a sort of internal DoD think-tank), and on his relationship to Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld has made Dr. Steven Cambone the head of analysis and evaluation, bringing him directly into the budgeting and programming process. Fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed—but more important, feared—by the services. The message is that, this time, Rumsfeld will get what he wants.

Cambone's even got his fingerprints on one of the more notorious WMD lies, Judith Miller's erstwhile "mobile bioweapons trailers" scoop, as An Economist Against Empire reported last year.

Bottom line here: Cambone is a key player in Rumsfeld's shadow Defense Department. If Cambone is responsible for sending Gitmo Miller to Iraq, then given their relationship you can damn well bet that Donald Rumsfeld is standing directly behind that decision. Miller was obviously a known quantity, and it was a foregone conclusion how he'd recommend handling Iraqi interrogations, which means that Rumsfeld knew exactly what he was buying when he dispatched Miller to be a prison consultant. Cambone's presence in this makes it a dead-on certainty that the abuse policy in Iraq emanates with full knowledge and direction from Donald Rumsfeld himself.

posted by michael  4:26:36 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Rummy's mojo. I kinda ran out of steam on Saturday, after what I intended to be the first of several posts: apparently there is such a thing as outrage overload. But there was a thought left hanging, and I want to try completing it ...

In the artificial division of labor between straight reporting and analysis, reporting leaves thought to the analysis side, while analysis leaves off the work of developing facts. Is it any wonder that reporting in such a regime becomes thoughtless, while analysis verges perilously on fantasy?

The news/analysis twin-pack is a double gesture toward the Record that the Paper of Record claims responsibility (however reluctantly) for maintaining. The Times' straight-reporting style implies that the Record is complex, unwieldy, not really suited to the understanding of mere readers. And when analysis appears in the news pages alongside straight reporting, it serves a largely ornamental function: it celebrates the occasion being Recorded by way of embellishing it with commentary. Formally divorced from reporting, that is from grounding in the work of fact, analysis in the Times becomes weightless and irresponsible. The analysis pieces that accompany straight news provide a point of view on major events, but the only source of viewpoint is the writer's attitude, and the only thing available to validate that attitude, usually, is the writer's ability to flaunt access, or project cleverness.

Given the degeneration of analysis into an ornamental exercise, it makes sense that the writers who most frequently show up to do analysis on Major Public Occasions are members of the Times' courtier class: writers like Todd Purdum or Jodi Wilgoren, like Kit Seelye and Liz Bumiller (who were assigned the analysis duties on Saturday, or Rummy Day), whose training seems mostly to be in knowing where power lies and how best to suck up to it. Consider Seelye's review of Friday's Rum performance on Capitol Hill ("For Six Hours Onstage, the Rumsfeld Survival Rules Displayed, by the Man Himself"), which is especially instructive even if it wasn't the officially designated A1 analysis piece. (If you're wondering why the Times doesn't just find a trained reviewer to do this sort of job, a drama or TV critic, instead of a political reporter: they actually tried it when Condi Rice testified before the 9/11 commission. The deeply addled weirdness that came from Alessandra Stanley's word processor is probably why they won't run that experiment again soon.)

Seelye's article is a courtier's performance par excellence: it does double duty, delivering an artful compliment while displaying the writer's ingenuity and serviceable eagerness to please. (It also offers, unintentionally, another example of a bizarre and nameless paraphilia possibly unique to Kit Seelye, which involves the public giving of blowjobs to elderly GOP officials.) With a vengeance, Seelye gives us the narrative coherence entirely lacking in A1's straight reporting on Rumsfeld's testimony: only problem being, the narrative has no independent support outside Kit's own brain. In Seelye's telling, Rummy's big day of testimony becomes a challenge to his aging manliness. Will he be able to negotiate it?

His more than six hours in the hot seat, first in the Senate then the House, showed him to be a man conflicted, pressed into a role as an apologist while suppressing his inner peacock. He left the door open on whether he would resign, saying he was wrestling with whether his effectiveness had been diminished. ...

His larger mission was to contain the growing fury on Capitol Hill over the Bush administration's handling of the war and over the nation's plummeting standing in the world. He called the prisoner-abuse scandal a catastrophe but said there was no reason for the United States to rethink its policy in Iraq, asserting, "I am convinced that we are doing exactly what ought to be done."

This was the self-assured executive on display, the one who instinctively glanced at his watch as he faced tough questioning in his final minutes before the Senate.

But sometimes, the confident executive pleaded ignorance. ... In the House, he repeatedly referred to his poor hearing. "Maybe my ears have gone bad," he said, adding, "I'm having a dickens of a time hearing folks." At one point, he seemed to miss a question entirely. "I'm sorry, did you just ask me a question? I couldn't hear a thing."

Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who is 87 but had no diminution of his sense of outrage, told Mr. Rumsfeld, "I see misplaced bravado, and an unwillingness to admit mistakes."

Has the much older Robert Byrd stolen Rummy's mojo? But the very next sentence starts Rumsfeld on the road back to his best and boldest self.

Mostly, Mr. Rumsfeld adhered to his famously pragmatic "Rumsfeld Rules," the list of survival tips that he has been keeping for the decades he has served in the capital, as a congressman and savvy bureaucrat.

Seelye's conceit, developed in the last phase of her narrative, is that it's Rummy's ability to call upon his own theoretical prescience that saves him: Rummy's Rules to the rescue! So Kit lets us watch as Rumsfeld recovers his balance and his skills, shaming Sen. Bayh and later, and even more forcefully, Rep. Meek when they suggest that he resign: his two-word reply to Bayh is spoken, according to Seelye, "with breathtaking simplicity, stunning the packed hearing room into utter silence" in apparent tribute to the Rumsfeldian presence. Indeed, by the last sentence of the article Rummy's, er, potency is fully restored:

Mr. Rumsfeld did not close the door on resigning. He was following another Rumsfeld Rule, which goes like this: "Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the president and do wonders for your performance."

Rummy's Rules: like Viagra for Congressional witnesses!

Is there any sense in which Kit Seelye has journalistic warrant for telling this story about the restorative effect of the codified Strangefeldian wisdom? Of course not—not unless Seelye has learned to read Rumsfeld's mind. But Seelye's job here isn't reporting, as such, or even reportorial analysis: journalistic only in appearance, this is really a form of secular mythography. Seelye's task is to hymn the Deputy Leader's bravery and insight, to make her audience sympathize with his ordeal and triumph, which she does with what I can only describe as Stalinist verve. See? It's not for nothing that those of us on the left keep calling the Times the New Pravda.

posted by michael  1:25:24 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

The twin-pack. Rumsfeld's testimony yesterday gets the full-on Major Public Event treatment from Saturday's Times: the A1 straight-news/news-analysis twin-pack, plus an inner-page review of Dr. Strangefeld's performance qua performance. And despite Dan Okrent's (self-serving, ultimately disingenuous) disavowal of the phrase, this pattern of coverage is very much in the style of a Paper of Record. (Okrent's piece is disingenuous, by the way, for ignoring how much the institutional power of the Times continues to reside in the "Paper of Record" idea, which Okrent obtusely treats as just some inexplicably lingering artifact of a bygone era, a perverse readerly nostalgia.)

It's easy not to notice how artificial a genre this is, that yokes together "reporting" and "analysis" on occasions of large public significance. At the moment, I don't have the time (or the means) to investigate the history of its establishment in the Times—but I can at least gesture toward its purpose and its effects. The twin-pack serves to produce the notion of a Record, by displaying and enforcing the difference between the "recording" function and its analytic sidekick. That the difference is not maintained out of journalistic probity—to create some kind of cordon sanitaire around the precincts of fact—the writerly results will testify. Okrent chides readers who might harbor a retrograde desire for omniscience in their newspaper by saying that they "deserve what they [would] get ... a catalog, a soporific or an apologist. Probably all three, in fact." But what could be more disconnected, more soporific, more superficial than the kind of reporting on offer in today's "straight" piece by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt ("Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse")? This dutiful, dull, thoughtless grab-bag is exemplary of the Times' house style for such things: it displays, not a respect for fact but a conviction (perhaps unconscious) that fact-based reporting is a rote exercise, a tedious fulfillment of the requirements of Record, better written than read.

Presented in contradistinction to "analysis," reportage isn't just relieved (as, obviously, it should never be) of the burden of thought: it's under some kind of obligation to avoid appearing as the product of thought, to the extent that narrative coherence and even plausible shape are out of bounds. Let's troll through the heads of the Shanker-Schmitt article by way of illustration:

• The public shaming—Rumsfeld apologizes (grafs 1 - 4)
• Further revelations, investigation on tap (5 - 8)
• Will Rummy resign? (9 - 15)
• Rummy & co.'s "demeanor" during testimony (16 - 20)
• Jumble of critical statements from members of Congress (21 - 25)
• What's up with the photographs? (26 - 29)
• Lawmakers question Rummy over the role of military intelligence, command in prisoner abuse (30 - 35)

I defy anyone to find a thread of logic in this arrangement. What we have here is a shabby paste-up of disjointed fragments, most of them four to five paragraphs in length, the seams ever more visible as the article fumbles toward its conclusion. I repeat, this is the Times standard for reporting of this nature. I might almost say that the style exists to discourage reading: to emphasize the weight and difficulty (and value) of job the Times performs maintaining the Record by putting readers in the position of being unable to make sense of it when it appears.

The most telling aspect of the article, I think, is that only in the last, most exhausted section—the piece's throw-up-our-hands-and-try-to-end-this final gasp—do the writers bother to address any issues of substance, any policy issues, that might have emerged in yesterday's full day of testimony. And you know what's really sad? Shanker-Schmitt's slapdash final grafs are the only place anywhere in the paper today to acknowledge that policy issues exist in the Abu Ghraib scandal and occupied anybody's attention as Rummy was being questioned. Everything else is public spectacle, personality, will-he-won't-he resign. Which begs the question, Why would the Times invest in producing a Record that it serves so badly? I'll get around to some thoughts about that when I post on today's "analysis" pieces.

posted by michael  3:32:24 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

And always spinning, spinning, spinning toward freedom. Possibly Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt intend the following, from this morning's article on the Rumsfeld situation ("Bush Sorry for Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners, but Backs Rumsfeld"), as some sort of reductio ad absurdum of the anonymous-Republican-insider gag:

At the White House, where Mr. Rumsfeld has exasperated senior staff members for what they perceive as his disdain for them, advisers said that Mr. Bush's dressing-down of Mr. Rumsfeld on Wednesday was not merely public relations. The president was uniformly described as furious at his defense secretary, even as his motive for authorizing his staff to leak the scolding to reporters was intensely debated.

Some Republicans close to the White House said that Mr. Bush had made public his slap of Mr. Rumsfeld to satisfy the critics, at least for now, but in a way that would allow him to preserve his option of firing Mr. Rumsfeld if more damaging information becomes public.

Another outside adviser speculated that Mr. Bush had reprimanded Mr. Rumsfeld because he felt that as a manager he had to address the failure of such an important subordinate, and that he well knew that his action would set off a feeding frenzy for Mr. Rumsfeld in Washington. "If that happens to put Rumsfeld in jeopardy, so be it," the adviser said.

Others said that Mr. Bush would never fire Mr. Rumsfeld, the prosecutor of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, just six months before the election. Vice President Dick Cheney, one of Mr. Rumsfeld's oldest and closest friends, was described by an administration official as fully supportive of Mr. Rumsfeld—a view, Republicans said, that would hold much sway with Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney has not said anything publicly about Mr. Rumsfeld, but the vice president was believed to have been in the Oval Office when Mr. Bush admonished Mr. Rumsfeld.

Jeebus, Liz, ease up—I surrender!

Is it churlish to point out that the alleged "dressing-down" that Bush delivered to Rumsfeld, treated by Bumiller and Schmitt as an immutable part of the public record, is known to us only from the self-interested reports of these (apparently numberless) anonymous insiders? But possibly it's unnecessary: even the writers allude to there being a "motive" behind what they describe—audaciously, for someone as obsessed with access as Bumiller—as a Bush-authorized leak, though they fail to report exactly which possible motives are being "intensely debated" (or, for that matter, by whom—passive voice, Liz!). Besides, the whole passage has a weird self-cancelling quality that might have been much admired by some of the literary theorists I studied with at Yale. To each his own spin points, and let every contradiction flower! If it turns out that Lizzy Boo is a disciple of Jacques Derrida, I may have to revise my understanding of her whole canon.

posted by michael  5:55:28 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Added to the Abu Ghraib dossier. A couple of items, again pressing toward the question of policy—who made it, and when (if not yet why):

Some U.S. officials said Rumsfeld was resistant to repeated warnings from Iraq governor L. Paul Bremer—delivered as early as last fall—that the United States was detaining too many Iraqis for too long and in poor conditions. Bremer told Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials that if the problem persisted, the political fallout in Iraq would be serious, the officials said. ...

According to ... interviews, Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall—both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as "kicking and screaming" about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained. A State Department official described "extreme frustration" that months of pressure produced no real change.

Bradley Graham and David Von Drehle, Washington Post, "Bush Apologizes for Abuse of Prisoners"

Thanks to Josh Marshall for the link. (Josh's post takes another piece of the WaPo article a bit too far: Graham and Von Drehle note that Geoffrey Miller "led a team to Iraq [last summer] to examine interrogation practices," which doesn't quite justify Josh saying that Miller's report was "ordered because of reports of problems with the detention of prisoners in the country." On the other hand, Josh concludes his post echoing mine from yesterday: "I still have some question whether Miller was sent out there—remember he went in August and September—because the insurgency was heating up at the time and it was felt that ... well, more needed to be done." I'd add that the issue for Miller's consulting gig in Iraq is less what may have occasioned it, officially, than what Miller's being chosen to go tips us about the real intent behind the mission.)

And Joe Conason has this, which adds a new (and noxious) name to the mix:

Long before official reports and journalistic exposés revealed the horrific abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, high-ranking American officers expressed their deep concern that the civilian officials at the Pentagon were undermining the military's traditional detention and interrogation procedures, according to a prominent New York attorney.

Scott Horton, a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler who now chairs the Committee on International Law of the Association of the Bar of New York City, says he was approached last spring by "senior officers" in the Judge Advocate General Corps, the military's legal division, who "expressed apprehension over how their political appointee bosses were handling the torture issue." ...

Horton says that the JAG officers specifically warned him that Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith,one of the most powerful political appointees in the Pentagon, had significantly weakened the military's rules and regulations governing prisoners of war. The officers told Horton that Feith and the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, were creating "an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" that would allow mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These are the stewards of democracy that Dear Leader has granted us: Conason notes that Feith's "scorn for international human rights law" is revealed in "his assessment of Protocol One, the 1977 Geneva accord protecting civilians, as 'law in the service of terrorism.'"

posted by michael  3:50:11 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Dumpf the Rumf. (Thanx to MaxSpeak for the phrase.) The Kerry campaign has a petition online calling for Rumsfeld's resignation. Go sign it.


posted by michael  2:04:27 PM  
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Toxic consequences. Consider the scandal of Abu Ghraib—which, as is becoming apparent, is the scandal of an entire gulag—from another angle: as a toxic, but logical, policy consequence of the assumptions with which the Pentagon took us to war.

Why was Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant, sent to Iraq last August to consult on the prison system? The likeliest possibility, to my mind, is that a decision was taken at a high level to start grinding down hard on "security detainees" in the CPA gulag: that there was high-level impatience with the quantity of intelligence product coming from Abu Ghraib (another possibility would be a decision to re-orient the detention regime toward intelligence production) and that Miller was the the go-to guy, the Pentagon's star screw-turning technocrat. Certainly a number of factors were in play that might have produced impatience. Months after the end of "major combat," our troops and our supply lines continued to be vulnerable to attack. The country was awash in weapons, up to and including RPGs, anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired SAMs. Worse might conceivably have been out there, given the virtually entire lack of security for weapons sites (even for sites with nuclear material) in the weeks following the collapse of the Hussein regime. Added to which, the clock was ticking: we were going to have to cede formal control of the country within a year, and with it at least a significant amount of our ability to operate Abu Ghraib and the rest of the gulag unimpeded.

Notice that every item in that description of the security situation results directly from the decision to go into Iraq quick and cheap and trust to luck for the aftermath. But let's flesh it out with one thing more, this one related to the TerraWar and the Administration's continued, delusory insistence on the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I've tended to figure, when confronted with the latest Pentagon hype about "foreign fighters" or "Baathist dead-enders," that I'm looking at nothing more than PR product—strictly for the rubes. But what if they disseminate that stuff because they believe it, and always have? How much more cause for urgency is there if you're working under the assumption that it's only a matter of time before Baathists (with access to some of Saddam's stolen billions) and Al Qaeda operatives hook up and really set the shitstorm to brewing? And what are your investigative tactics going to be, knowing that in a tribal society you have virtually no opportunity (and no time) to work your way into the terror or proto-terror networks you're sure must be forming?

These, then, are the conditions under which Gen. Geoffrey Miller makes his appearance. Representing, perhaps, yet another quick-and-cheap Pentagon solution: systematic (and bureaucratically "correct") brutality as the royal road to security. Probably wasn't even a tough sell.

posted by michael  7:00:44 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

The torture pros. Ultimately, the story of Abu Ghraib is not the story of a single prison, or of the abuses committed there. It's the story of a gulag—a system of prisons, permanent and ad hoc, supporting a program of widespread, arbitrary detention of Iraqi nationals, with the purpose not of maintaining social peace but of imposing political control on a subject population. From the Washington Post:

Interviews with former Iraqi prisoners and human-rights advocates present a picture of the U.S. prison system here as a vast wartime effort to extract information from the enemy rather than to punish criminals. Former prisoners say lengthy interrogation sessions, employing sleep depravation, severe isolation, fear, humiliation and physical duress, were regular features of their daily regimen and remain so for the estimated 2,500 to 7,000 people inside the jails.

The system comprises 16 prisons, four of which hold prisoners accused of being part of the anti-occupation insurgency. But there are countless other holding cells on U.S. bases, many once used by former president Saddam Hussein's government, where young Iraqis spend their first fearful hours in captivity.

[Numbers are a little confusing here: Dexter Filkins' article yesterday mentions a current prisoner population of 3,800, down from "as many as 8,000," in Abu Ghraib alone. I'm uncertain how or whether the WaPo's 16 prisons maps onto the "14 'tactical' prisons on military bases," some of them mobile, that Filkins' article noted. But the numbers aren't really the point.]

To the extent that the press focuses on prisoner abuse—ineluctably drawn by the expanding catalog of visual evidence—it risks missing the deeper story, the story of the gulag, of the policies that created it and govern its use, and of the people responsible for those policies. Fortunately, there's a relatively easy path from the abuse allegations to that deeper set of questions, and some hope of that path being followed. Here's Sy Hersh, on O'Reilly's show, of all things, correcting Big Blowhard Bill on the history of Army investigations prior to the Taguba report:

HERSH: This guy Taguba is brilliant. He could have made a living doing—it's a credit to the Army that somebody with that kind of integrity would write this kind of—it's a 53-page report.

O'REILLY: OK, but Sanchez the commander put him in charge fairly quickly. They mobilized fairly quickly.

HERSH: No, look, I don't want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations.

One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it's very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison.

[Thanks to Kevin Drum for the transcript.] Hersh's comments are anticipated by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt yesterday in the Times, who note that "the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib took place in November, after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then in charge of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, recommended changes in procedures intended 'to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence.'"

I have a strong hunch that Miller, who relieved Janis "Colonel Klink" Karpinski as overseer of the Iraqi gulag, is going to turn out to be the linchpin of this story. (Which, because Miller was formerly the Grand Inquisitor of Gitmo, may eventually blow back to the abusive regime there.) His employment as warden of Abu Ghraib was preceded by this gig as what amounts to a prison consultant, which seems to be what Hersh is referring to above:

In late August and early September, 2003, a team from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited Iraq to see whether it could help U.S. forces there obtain better information from detainees. That team was overseen by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander at Guantanamo.

Among its recommendations were that military police guards act as "an enabler for interrogation," Taguba's report found.

LA Times, "Report on Iraqi Prison Found 'Systemic and Illegal Abuse'"

[Thanks to Billmon for the article link.] Why was Miller brought in from Gitmo last August to consult on the detention program? Who sent him, and how was the decision arrived at? I haven't seen anyone address those questions yet. Most important: was Miller asked for a report that would correct abuses in the Iraqi gulag—or was he asked for a report that would rationalize and formalize abuse? Unintentionally, no doubt, Dexter Filkins' interview with Miller yesterday weights things strongly toward the latter option. Read it for the satisfied self-portrait of our own homegrown torture bureaucrat:

Interrogations [at Abu Ghraib], General Miller said, are by so-called Tiger Teams, each consisting of one or two interrogators, a linguist and an intelligence analyst. First, the Tiger Team typically draws up what the general called an "interrogation plan." In it, they must specify any of the 50 special interrogation techniques they intend to use. The use of the techniques must be approved, he said.

Interrogation sessions, the general said, may last from one to six hours. Ordinarily, he said, the intelligence analyst observes from another room. Longer interviews require additional approval.

General Miller said that while interrogations often took the form of "aggressive conversations," coercive techniques like sleep deprivation and the use of hoods were not currently being used. Physical contact between interrogator and detainee is prohibited, he said. ...

"Could they, if they requested, use sleep deprivation as a technique?" the general said. "It could be done. I'll tell you that that decision is held at a very high level."

Surely Miller was a known quantity within the Pentagon; surely the recommendations he and his team would arrive at might have been easily predicted. That has to have been the point, right? And he was placed in charge, at last, to see his recommendations carried out, not dismantled. So: just who called in the torture pros to Iraq, and when are their heads gonna roll?

posted by michael  1:43:35 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Gaining intelligence? After having pretty much entirely dropped the ball—strike that, after having entirely failed to pick up the ball—in the immediate aftermath of Sixty Minutes II breaking the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, the Times is decidedly getting its act together. Two A1 pieces are devoted the scandal, including Ian Fisher's interview with Hayder Sabbar Abd, one of the Iraqi prisoners who was subject to sexual humiliation in the infamous photos, along with all of four inner-page articles, one of them a short but powerful piece of street-level observation by Christine Hauser ("Iraqis Line Up, Hoping to See Jailed Relatives"), who we see standing on line outside Abu Ghraib with a crowd of Iraqis trying to find information about their relatives inside. (I've been meaning for a while to note how admirably consistent Hauser is putting herself in places most other Western reporters seem unwilling to go, and how well and sympathetically she writes when she's there. Of course, those pieces are typically relegated to back pages.)

The unfortunate standout among today's inner-page articles comes from the latterly Borg-ified Dexter Filkins, whose job this time apparently is to serve as apologist for Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Gitmo Grand Inquisitor and current warden of Abu Ghraib. Here are the lead grafs:

The American commander in charge of military jails in Iraq said Tuesday that he had decided to reduce the number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison sharply. The move comes after a military investigation into photographs and other evidence of prisoner mistreatment identified overcrowding as contributing to an abusive and chaotic atmosphere.

The commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, also said he had decided to end the hooding of prisoners, largely because it was too humiliating. But he defended practices like depriving prisoners of sleep and forcing them into "stress positions" as legitimate means of interrogation, noting that they are among 50-odd coercive techniques sometimes used against enemy detainees.

General Miller was chief of detentions and interrogations at the American Naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and has held that post in Iraq for a month. He said he saw his main purpose in both places as extracting as much intelligence as possible to help the American war effort.

"We were enormously proud of what we had done in Guantánamo, to be able to be able to set that kind of environment where we were focused on gaining the maximum amount of intelligence," General Miller said.

"General Will Trim Inmate Numbers at Iraq Prison"

On the very same page as this Filkinsian puffery, Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt's article about official inquiry into the abuses notes a, shall we say, interesting Miller-related coincidence:

The worst abuses at Abu Ghraib took place in November, after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then in charge of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, recommended changes in procedures intended "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," according to General Taguba's report.

The highlighted phrase indicates the length to which Filkins goes to give Miller his love. Miller has not, as implied, initiated action to end the practice of hooding, nor for the reason implied, a concern to avoid unnecessary humiliation of prisoners. A later graf in Filkins' own piece contradicts the suggestions of the lead:

The use of hoods during interrogation had ended before he arrived a month ago, he said, adding that he had decided four days ago to bar its remaining use, when prisoners were moved from one jail to another.

"It sends a message we do not want to send to the civilian population," he said. "If we were going to continue to use hooding, we would use a less intrusive method that will accomplish the same thing."

Nor is this the only case of contradiction or incoherence in the article. The lead grafs note Miller defending "practices like depriving prisoners of sleep and forcing them into 'stress positions'" during the interview, but Filkins' account never offers that defense. Instead, by the conclusion of the piece Filkins has Miller maintaining, with odd specificity, that sleep deprivation is largely out of bounds.

General Miller said that while interrogations often took the form of "aggressive conversations," coercive techniques like sleep deprivation and the use of hoods were not currently being used. ... "We do not use sleep deprivation, unless that is approved at the general officer level," he said, saying the same held for stripping detainees.

He said that in some 22,000 interrogations, sleep deprivation was not used at Guantánamo.

I've got to think that Filkins is colluding in a certain amount of bureaucratic language slicing here. Miller's present tense ("We do not use sleep deprivation") begs the question whether that's simply policy now, and whether policy has been different either at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib at any point in the recent past. Likewise: Let's notice how that "22,000 interrogations without sleep deprivation" is meant to seem like a repudiation of the technique—while being rather far from an actual repudiation. How many interrogations have been conducted at Gitmo, overall—and what's the count of those where sleep deprivation has been featured? (And what about sleep deprivation that might occur between interrogations? Any accounting available there?) Filkins doesn't seem to have been rude enough to try to pin Gen. Miller down on any of these follow-up questions.

At this point, Filkins might as well just drop the journalist disguise and start hiring himself out directly as a CPA press flack. The operation's run by Republicans, after all, so it probably pays pretty well.

posted by michael  4:47:53 PM  
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Not dead yet. I didn't post about Adam Nagourney's most recent hand-wringer about the Kerry campaign, on Sunday, because it was a nice day in Chicago and I had better things to do than repeat criticisms of the umpteenth A1 repeat of the "concerns" of unnamed Democrats that the game's all up already. (Maybe I should just put a counter for these things on the front page and be done with it: the Kerry Death Watch counter.) Happily, Salon this morning has a very good summary of the state of play that takes off from Nagourney's article, with a lead that puts things nicely into perspective:

With just months to go in an election that ought to be a referendum on President Bush, the New York Times runs a front-page story: The Democrats are in serious trouble. Although Bush's approval ratings are low, the presumptive Democratic nominee can't get any traction. His campaign "continues to confront a cloud of doubts and reservations," the Times says, and voters are complaining that he hasn't offered the country a clear vision for the future.

It may sound like the Times on John Kerry in 2004. In fact, it's the Times on Bill Clinton in 1992.

Tim Grieve, "Premature panic"

Read the whole thing. It'll help you remain calm.

posted by michael  9:21:28 AM  
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Right after they highlight Bush's Guard service ... Given the pretty appalling track records of David Halbfinger and Jim Rutenberg, I confess I'm surprised at the sober tone and relative even-handedness on display in today's A1 article about the big Kerry campaign ad buy ("Kerry Life Story Will Be Focus of Big Ad Buy"). We still have the obligatory scattering of quotes (and I do mean scattering—there seems almost no principle of organization in the piece) from anonymous Democrats fretting about the lateness of the ad buy, along with the convenient repetition of Republican anti-Kerry themes, but muted, even perfunctory. (The obligatory, irrelevant attack quote from Dick "Dick" Cheney gets shoveled in, but not until four grafs from the end of the piece—usually in these things you expect it in the first four grafs.) The writers even allow Kerry campaign aides a sharp observation or two:

Mr. Kerry's aides asserted that the president's strategy was little more than to "destroy John Kerry," and that it had failed because the two men were still running neck and neck in the polls.

"While George Bush has spent $60 million to run negative ads," said Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, "John Kerry is up with a stronger message that will define the themes of his presidency: 'Together we can build a stronger America.'"

None of which means the worm is turning on A1—but the article certainly makes a break from the unrelieved Bush triumphalism that characterized the Times' campaign-strategy coverage just a month or so ago.

And let's not neglect a moment of unusual drollery in the piece. The fact that one of the Kerry ads "associates Mr. Kerry with Senator John McCain, ... showing a picture of the two senators side-by-side and noting their cooperation with each other" in the effort to account for American MIAs in Vietnam, has had its intended effect: Rutenfinger have taken notice. (Could that be the reason their article doesn't hew so closely as you'd expect to the Approved Narrative of Kerry weakness?) Not only do they devote the piece's third graf to the McCain appearance, they pull a hell of a snarky quote about it from a McCain spokesman:

Mr. Kerry's use of Mr. McCain's image came without his permission, though a campaign aide contacted the Arizona senator's office on Monday morning to inform him, said Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for Mr. McCain.

Mr. Wittmann said Mr. McCain was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

"A plethora of presidential candidates have mentioned Senator McCain over the past year," Mr. Wittmann said, alluding to Democrats like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman who invoked Mr. McCain's name in the primaries.

Mr. Wittmann added: "The Kerry ad is factually correct, and who knows? Perhaps the Bush campaign will highlight Senator McCain's work with the president as well."

Halbenberg omit mention of the snicker that accompanied that last statement, but context is more than adequate to supply it.

posted by michael  5:01:44 PM  
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It's going to get much, much worse. This is what fascism looks like, as practiced by our military police in Iraq.

After a few days of interrogation, Abdulrazzaq said he was taken to Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. There he lived in a tent with 40 other prisoners. Showers were available once a week when Army water tankers pulled up in front of portable bathrooms. A liter of water was expected to last each prisoner a week, he said, and a weekly Army MRE augmented their one meal a day.

Unruly prisoners were placed in shipping containers used to house the prison dogs, he said. The smell inside was horrible, and detention there would last days.

He was interrogated every two weeks. He was taken to a room with his hands and feet tied together, he said, then thrown on the floor. In that position, he would endure hours of questioning, much of it designed to elicit a confession that he was part of the insurgency or inform on his neighbors -- many of whom, he said, were already tent mates.

Then one day he was informed at 5 a.m. that he was being released. He never saw a lawyer or any evidence against him.

(Thanks to Billmon for the link.) The torture and abuse have been systematic, throughout a 16-camp gulag and God knows how many ad hoc holding cells on military bases. This is policy, and as the responsible officer of government Bush deserves nothing less than war-crimes prosecution for it. Let's hope this WaPo article is the beginning of sustained press attention, and not just the sort of one-off, just-till-the Jackson-trial-heats-up kind of thing we've become so sadly accustomed to.

Update: Bremer was informed last November about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. He was uninterested. Put him in the dock. Put every one of these motherfuckers in the dock.

posted by michael  7:04:16 PM  
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Blue (-state) meanies. Never let it be said that Carl Hulse failed to lend Bill Frist a hand. The first third of Hulse's A1 story today, co-authored with Robert Pear, on process delays imposed by Senate Democrats in protest of their being shut out of legislative decision-making ("Feeling Left Out on Major Bills, Democrats Turn to Stalling Others" in the print headline), reads as if the ol' Tennessee cat-killer himself had written the indictment:

Senate Democrats, shut out of Congressional negotiations on Medicare and other important bills last year, are blocking House-Senate negotiations on other bills unless they are guaranteed a voice in writing the final legislation.

The tactic has infuriated Republicans and contributed to election-year paralysis as the House and Senate struggle to work out compromises needed to make law. ...

Republicans say the parliamentary tactic, which has not been used extensively in the past, illustrates the extent to which Democrats will go to block legislation, even bills with bipartisan support. They say Democrats are trying to usurp the power of the Republican majorities in the Senate and the House. Senate Republicans say they will force the issue this week by requiring votes on the formation of conference committees.

"To think the minority can write a predetermined outcome to every bill that comes through the Senate is pretty presumptuous," said Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, the majority leader.

The opening concludes with an outrageous example of Democratic perfidy:

Republicans say Senate Democrats are also blocking measures on charitable giving and job training. Bills to provide tax breaks for charitable giving were approved by lopsided votes, 95 to 5 in the Senate in April 2003 and 408 to 13 in the House in September. The jobs bill provoked fiery partisan debate in the House, but the Senate passed its version by unanimous consent.

Though Hulse doesn't go on to report it, it seems likely that those Democratic bastards are also blocking bills that would honor motherhood and provide free candy to orphans. He follows this graf with a quote from Nancy Pelosi, accusing Republicans of having "forgotten that we are here to work cooperatively to get the job done for the American people": the only purpose for placing the quote as he does is so that Hulse can convict the Democratic leadership of talking out of both sides of its mouth.

The fact that Daschle's Dems are fighting back against the most thumpingly partisan Senate leadership in memory cuts no ice with Hulse, who seems flabbergasted that the Democrats should be proving such meanies. It's not the first time Hulse has given his pal Dr. Frist a pass. Back in March, Reading A1 noticed him writing about a little anti-Kerry show staged after passage of the so-called "Unborn Victims of Violence Act": Hulse was uninterested in noting, though it seemed essential context, Bill Frist's explicitly stated program (as reported in the WaPo) of turning the Senate legislative agenda into an all-culture-war, all-the-time election year extravaganza. For Hulse, apparently, it's only partisan when the Demos are doing it.

What's bizarre about today's article is that its middle third is chock-full of examples of the Republican obstructionism (specifically, as the article states, "abuse of the conference process") that's led to the current pass. The middle grafs exist in almost perfect disconnect from the outer portions of the article. The work of Robert Pear, maybe? Did Hulse even bother to read his colleague's writing? Nevertheless, the true Hulse-ian persona reemerges at the article's end, when we get a story whose moral, as with the Pelosi quote, is that you just can't trust those Dems:

Experts on Senate procedure recalled one precedent. In 1994, Republicans, then in the minority, prevented the Senate from going to conference on a campaign finance bill.

The Senate and the House had passed radically different versions of the campaign legislation. Democrats in the two chambers had worked out a detailed informal agreement, which could have been ratified in a conference. Senate Republicans rejected the terms of the deal. ...

"Gridlock is making a big comeback," Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, said then. It was Democrats who expressed outrage and complained of obstructionist tactics at that time.

Hah! They speak with forked tongue! Hulse goes on to let McConnell explain just why the Republicans were right to do what they did then, "in an isolated case," while the Democrats are entirely in the wrong now. And he generously gives the Senator from the Dark Side the article's final word, which unsurprisingly is a ringing condemnation of the Dems' current tactics as "a stunning perversion of the democratic process." Can't blame Hulse there, though. If anybody would know about perversions of democracy, it'd be Mitch McConnell.

posted by michael  6:33:54 PM  
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Remember thou art but mortal. Supposedly, a reminder that Philip of Macedon had a slave whisper to him—or that was whispered to Roman generals as they rode in their triumphal cars. Either way, I was put in mind of it by a Brad DeLong post about the limits of certainty:

There are times ... when I think that the hallmark of true intelligence is to recognize that one may not know everything, and that one should take special care to avoid actions that are impossible or very costly to reverse. ...

As Oliver Cromwell said: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken."

Would that our war preznit had a lackey on duty in the Oval Office ready to repeat "Consider that you might be mistaken" every time another excellent adventure was about to be authorized.

The lesson about leaders and certainty ought also to be propounded regularly to the corporate press. A propos of support for, or opposition to, the Iraq war, Josh Marshall notes the

tendency to polarize this debate to its weakest, most simplistic extremes. Nader is consistent; Bush is consistent; Kerry, by failing to be an imbecile, is in the wishy-washy middle, neither fish nor fowl, a flipflopper, waiting for the next flip from which to flop.

The "Gotcha!" games played by imbeciles like Pumpkinhead Russert—the formal parody to which the mainstream media have reduced independent, fact-checking journalism—do enormous damage to the hope for sane, responsible government, by stacking the deck against anybody intelligent enough, in Brad's sense, to recognize that democratic leadership cannot be a matter (for the most part) of world-be-damned certainty. And against anybody with a record of public service that might validate that sort of intelligence.

posted by michael  11:05:11 AM  
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Devil's bargains. How parlous is the state our supine corporate media is in? They had to wait for moral cover from George W. Bush to talk about the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib:

President Bush said Friday that he was deeply disgusted by reports that Iraqi detainees were abused by American military police, and he vowed that any soldier found to be at fault would be punished.

Mr. Bush spoke in the White House Rose Garden on a day that photographs circulated around the globe showing American soldiers smiling, laughing and holding their thumbs up as naked Iraqi detainees were forced into sexually abusive and humiliating positions. ...

The American military in Iraq announced on March 20 that six members of an Army Reserve military police unit assigned to Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghad faced charges of assault, cruelty, indecent acts and maltreatment of detainees.

Thom Shanker and Jacques Steinberg, "Bush Voices 'Disgust' at Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners"

If you missed that Mar. 20 announcement, don't feel too bad: the Times buried Thom Shanker's cursory writeup of the announcement, and never recurred to the topic again in the following month. Likewise the AP, the LA Times, and Knight-Ridder, all of whom ran the announcement without devoting further attention to it. (According to a very brief Knight-Ridder add-on the next day, "CNN quoted Pentagon sources as saying that some soldiers took photos of prisoners who were partially nude, and some portrayed inappropriate physical contact between soldiers and detainees": again, no followup to that report.) It's interesting to note that on Mar. 24, a number of articles datelined Abu Ghraib appeared in the American press, mostly picking up an AP account of the release of 272 coalition "security detainees" from the prison. Looking back, it's hard not to think that the release was intended as some kind of misdirection play.

How Dubya is even allowed an expression of disgust in this matter—much less allowed to lead the first substantial press reaction to it—is beyond me. Seymour Hersh, writing an essential, impressively detailed account of the incidents and the Army investigation for the New Yorker, nails it down in a summary graf:

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. [Maj. Gen. Antonio] Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

Abu Ghraib was—is—American policy, Bush policy. It's cheap to say I'm not surprised by what's coming out, but, well, I'm not surprised. Abu Ghraib was Saddam Hussein's Lubyanka, every bit the apt imitation of its Stalinist prototype. We marched into Baghdad, and instead of razing the prison and salting the earth beneath it, as a decent respect for its victims might have demanded, we took it over. It had been emptied by Saddam's last-gasp amnesty, and we began restocking it—with our politicals, naturally. Meet the new boss, indeed. Can Iraqis have had any doubt about the message that symbolism was supposed to send? Can the Americans?

One of the things that started me in the blogging direction was a December Sixty Minutes report that prominently featured the now-relieved Gen. Janis Karpinski in her role as commandant of Abu Ghreib. The report wasn't about the torture of prisoners: its focus was on the hounding and imprisonment of anti-Saddam Iraqi democrats by American troops, who in Karbala at least appeared to have made a devil's bargain with ex-Baathist security agents to maintain civil order. The sequence in which Steve Croft attempted to retrieve information from Karpinski about one such oppositionist, a former Karbala city councilor who had been held incommunicado for more than a month in Abu Ghreib, had me literally shaking with anger.

"We have prisoners in all of our facilities who, I mean there's nobody being held for no reason," says Karpinski. "There's foundation or, or charges for all of our prisoners."

60 Minutes followed Gen. Karpinski to the computer room and waited. She had told us that all prisoners were charged after an initial 72-hour processing period. But Najeeb al Shami had been in Abu Ghreib for more than a month.

Finally, she was able to find him.

"We've located the individual you were asking about and the process for him, the in-processing portion is not completed yet, and I've been asked not to release any additional information because his in-processing is not completed yet," says Karpinski.

Obviously, Kroft said, it’s taken a lot longer than 72 hours to process al Shami’s case.

60 Minutes was then asked to turn off the camera. Gen. Karpinski told us that al Shami was "suspected of crimes against the coalition," and had not yet been charged, and would not necessarily be allowed access to his family and lawyers.

Watching stone-faced, gimlet-eyed Warden Karpinski slowly close the lid on al Shami, I couldn't avoid the thought that I was seeing exactly what too many desperate Iraqis had seen over too long during the Saddam regime—only with an American inflection. I didn't especially need to see torture pictures to know exactly what this woman was capable of overlooking, or know that she was in place precisely for her capacity to overlook. George W. Bush is responsible for Janis Karpinski, and he's responsible for Abu Ghraib, and I can't think of any more pressing reason for getting the son-of-a-bitch out of office.

posted by michael  3:59:16 PM  
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