Another instructive comparison between the Times and the Washington Post. One of these papers, after a two-week burst of energy reporting on the most explosive political story of our generation, the Iraq prisoner torture scandal, has recently reset to its default position: passive and incurious. Guess which one?

In the Post, Dana Milbank and Dana Priest write about a remarkable passage-at-arms in the Bush news conference yesterday marking the end of the G-8 summit:

President Bush said Thursday that he expects U.S. authorities to follow the law when interrogating prisoners abroad, but he declined to say whether he believes torture is permitted under the law.

Pressed repeatedly during a news conference here about a Justice Department memo saying torture could be justified in the war on terrorism, Bush said only that U.S. interrogators had to follow the law.

Asked whether he agrees with the Justice Department view, Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen the memorandum. "The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations," he said.

A second questioner asked Bush whether he would authorize "any means necessary" to elicit information from a prisoner who had information about an imminent terrorist attack. The president replied: "What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law."

Pointing out that the administration lawyers who wrote the memo believe terrorist suspects could be tortured without violating the law, a third questioner asked whether torture is ever morally justified. "Look, I'm going to say it one more time," Bush replied. "Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."*

"Bush: U.S. Expected to Follow Law On Prisoners "

The defensiveness, the sneering tone, the repetitive, legalistic refusal to engage with the substantive issue: Milbank and Priest capture it all very efficiently. (You might also want to read Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing today, "A Tortured Non-Denial," with a roundup of coverage of the press conference.) The rest of their article is devoted to summarizing, as background for Bush's testy performance, the evolving understanding of the Administration effort to redefine (to define away any meaning from) the law on torture—a subject to which Milbank and Priest, among others, are devoting sustained and serious attention.

And here's Richard Stevenson and David Sanger of the Times, writing about that same conference and that very passage:

Despite the continuing tensions, Mr. Bush appeared relaxed and at times almost ebullient as he took questions for 40 minutes, ranging from reflections on Ronald Reagan's presidency to the failure so far to find banned weapons in Iraq.

When the subject turned to the treatment of prisoners, Mr. Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen secret Pentagon and Justice Department legal opinions that concluded he had broad authority to determine what techniques could be used to interrogate unlawful combatants seized in Afghanistan. But he insisted several times that his only orders were that interrogators must "conform to U.S. law" and act "consistent with international treaty obligations."

His answer is not likely to put to rest the question of whether the White House condoned harsh treatment of prisoners or coercive interrogation techniques because administration legal memorandums appeared to re-interpret both American law and international treaties concerning torture. One administration memo concluded that "in wartime it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to be prevail against the enemy," including interrogation techniques.

While the administration has insisted that these advisory opinions never resulted in orders to change the way prisoners were treated, critics have argued that they showed an effort to loosen restrictions on interrogations, and that techniques created at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were eventually used in Iraq.

"Bush Doesn't Expect NATO to Provide Troops for Iraq"

I'm setting the most generous bounds possible for this, because in an extensive article focused on Bush's news conference it represents all the notice the Times bothers to take of the torture topic. No sneering from Bush here about whether a reporter's moral qualms about torture should find "comfort" in Dubya's mechanically repeated legalisms: no sense that the questioning was difficult at all, or raised any Presidential hackles. Indeed, Stevenson and Sanger go out of their way to remark on Bush's "relaxed and at times ebullient" demeanor. (Froomkin, by contrast, calls it a "moody press conference," with Bush "largely jolly, but sometimes snappish.") Sure, Dubya may have claimed faulty memory about those pesky legal memos, "but he insisted several times" (as if he had felt himself moved to insist, rather than forced to by aggressive questioning) that he's committed to law. No sense from Stevenson/Sanger that Bush was anything other than forthright or anything less than in command, or that readers might have any reason to be skeptical of the sincerity of that expressed commitment.

And how inane is that "critics have argued" disclaimer? A little clue for Stevenson and Sanger: the "effort to loosen restrictions on interrogations," the Gitmo-izing of Iraqi prisons, are facts that have been extensively documented of late in, among others, the pages of the New York Times. You boys might want to try reading it once in a while.

*The transcript provides context that makes Bush's remark about "comfort" seem much less unmotivatedly malicious than it appears in Milbank and Priest's treatment. On the other hand, the barely concealed contempt strikes you even more forcefully (as does the all too familiar mechanical repetition):

Q Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government.

posted by michael  4:06:49 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

NYT ADD. Can anyone explain to me how assignments work at the Times?

When the Abu Ghraib torture scandal started breaking in a big way—specifically, when the Senate began taking public testimony at the beginning of May—Douglas Jehl shifted from his regular beat, covering the intelligence establishment. Starting on May 15, Jehl took the lead in a Howell Raines-style "flood the zone" approach to the story; in the last two weeks of the month he was bylined on 16 articles, all of them on the torture scandal, which had become his exclusive focus. And though I found a good deal to criticize in Jehl's work, especially earlier in that period, by the end of May it seemed to me that his efforts were beginning to produce results, particularly on what might be called the entrepreneurial aspects of Gen. Geoffrey Miller's involvement with the Iraq gulag.

And since the beginning of June? Dead silence. Jehl hasn't written a word about torture, and in the wake of George Tenet's resignation he's focused, far less consequentially, on the CIA and its institutional challenges. The Times' coverage of the torture scandal has devolved to the decidedly B-team Neil Lewis and Eric Schmitt, Jehl's most frequent co-author in May. At just the moment when the countours of the legal effort to craft a torture policy are beginning to come clear—when the memorandum trail is making it possible to document the hand of the White House in all this—it would seem that in the Times' judgement the zone no longer requires flooding.

And as an inevitable consequence, the paper is once again getting waxed by the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. As, for instance, yesterday, when the WaPo published an article by R. Jeffrey Smith that, as Susan at Suburban Guerilla puts it, gets us quite a bit closer to the source of the rot:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."

The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned "sensitive issues," and Jordan said, "Very sensitive. Yes, sir," according to the account, which was provided by a government official.

The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military's scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.

"Soldier Described White House Interest"

Flooding the zone is nice, but the real trick might be to hire editors who don't suffer from ADD. Or is Bill Keller just turning chickenshit now that the story's edging ever closer to the Torturer-in-Chief?

posted by michael  11:22:20 AM  
tell me about it []