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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