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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