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  
tell me about it []  

 

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  
tell me about it []