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  
tell me about it []  

 

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  
tell me about it []