The song of the kazoo. Did you know that Jay Bybee, the lawyer and now federal judge who prepared the DoJ's August 2002 torture memo now being disavowed by the department, has a "playful side"? The Times is all over it:

The judge is not without a playful side.

"He has a kazoo collection," said N. Gregory Smith, a former colleague on the law faculty at Louisiana State. "He'd get a little ensemble of kazoo enthusiasts together and play. They would occasionally perform the '1812' Overture."

"Author of '02 Memo on Torture: 'Gentle' Soul for a Harsh Topic"

That's just the kind of fearless, hard-hitting journalism I've come to expect from A1!

The article, on the subject of ... well, on or near the subject of Bybee himself, or his confirmation, or the torture memo (it's a little unclear), bears Adam Liptak's byline but credits reporting by Eric Lichtblau, David Johnston and Richard Stevenson. That's a lot of cooks for some awfully thin broth. With so many hands reaching for the tiller (to switch metaphors), the piece lurches about crazily trying to settle on a topic, and never does. Here are the first three grafs, and if you can see a principle of organization here you're a better reader than I am:

The Bush administration is distancing itself from a memorandum prepared two years ago by a government lawyer asserting that the president's power to use torture to extract information from suspected terrorists is almost unlimited. [News hook—it's about the memos.]

Before the recent controversy concerning his work, however, some of the officials who received the memorandum worked diligently to elevate the lawyer, Jay S. Bybee, to the federal bench. Nominated by President Bush in 2002 and confirmed by the Senate last year, he now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. [No, it's not a floor wax, it's a dessert topping! The story's about whether Bybee's confirmation was compromised by suppression of his work for the DoJ on interrogation policy.]

Former colleagues say the judge, whose chambers are in Las Vegas, is a serious, soft-spoken, reflective man. They say it is difficult to reconcile his discussion of torture in clinical, dispassionate detail with his background. A former legal academic, Judge Bybee told Meridian, a Mormon magazine, last year that he hoped to be remembered for his probity. "I would like my headstone to read, 'He always tried to do the right thing,' " Judge Bybee said. [Ummm ... it's a floor wax and a dessert topping? A sticky-sweet profile of one of Johnny Ashcroft's best torture apologists?]

The madcap, random discussion that follows, in the course of whose 1200 attention-deficit-disordered words virtually every imaginable facet of the torture memo story (including a few unimaginable ones, like the kazoo enthusiasts) flashes incomprehensibly past, is as apt a metaphor for the dismal intellectual and moral state of the Times at this moment as I've yet seen. You'll have to read it for yourself—I really can't do it justice. On the most important policy scandal in a generation, there's thunder from the WaPo and the Wall Street Journal, but all they've got at the Times are these freakin' kazoos.

posted by michael  5:32:30 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

The objectivity game. The fact that the Times assigned its lead article yesterday, on the White House's selective, partial, declassified-for-PR-purposes dump of torture policy documents late Monday, to one of its most reliably Administration-oriented propagandists—and that the reporter who basically spent every waking moment for much of May working the torture story was relegated to a secondary, jump-page piece—tells you just how far the paper has backed off from its brief, unaccustomed exercise in relevance last month. (It does not tell you why the paper has decided to abandon the hunt, a question I myself have precious little insight into.)

Since I'm playing catchup from a moderately heavy non-blog schedule (i.e., work) yesterday, I'm not going to try to point out everything wrong with Richard Stevenson's piece (the abominably headlined "Orders by Bush About Prisoners Set Humane Tone"). But the article does offer an instructive example of how a writer like Stevenson can choose his terms of engagement, within an ostensibly objective form, so as to subtly disparage the authority of the independent record in favor of mere assertion and andoyne spin. (Like the Administration he regularly panders to, Stevenson seems to value the conclusions of faith greatly over adherence to the reality principle.) Here's the key passage, in which Stevenson accomplishes a nearly complete inversion of the reporter/politician ratios:

Democrats said the documents released Tuesday appeared to represent only a portion of important legal documents related to detainees.

The administration released the documents after months in which its policies toward interrogation and torture have been called into question by the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. The documents showed that the effort to draw up new rules for interrogation after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks drastically widened the scope of techniques considered at the highest levels of the administration, but also in the end a reluctance to endorse many of them.

The release of the documents seemed to be driven by a sense at the White House that the gravity of the prison abuses required a fuller disclosure of the legal papers and internal debate that formed the basis for Washington's handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Administration officials said that the documents did not circulate widely in the government at the time they were prepared and that there was no connection between their exploration of the legalities of various interrogation techniques and what happened at Abu Ghraib.

On Tuesday, Democrats dismissed the administration's document release as highly selective and said it failed to address important questions about its handling of detainee issues. ... "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a statement. "Now, responding to public pressure, the White House has released a small subset of the documents that offers glimpses into the genesis of this scandal. All should have been provided earlier to Congress, and much more remains held back and hidden away from public view."

This is artful in its way, though it's a slimy art. Democrats said the document release was partial and selective? Well, yes, they did: but either the release was selective or it wasn't, as a matter of fact, and Stevenson might have—ought to have—reported that fact on his own authority. Instead he chooses to diminish its status as fact, and obscure a rather key point, by slapping the "partisan" label over it.

That's Stevenson's consistent technique: if an assertion would be uncomfortable to the Bushies, even if it's demonstrably true, it's assigned to "Democrats" or "critics." (Administration assertions, conversely, are almost always allowed to stand unqualified, drawn into the orbit of "objective" authority by being mixed, as in this passage, with statements that Stevenson makes in propria.) Meanwhile, Stevenson has no compunction using the rhetoric of objectivity—"the documents showed", the release "seemed [to an (implicitly impartial) observer] to be driven"—to clothe what are after all mere interpretations—sweeping, unjustified, extremely dubious interpretations. And he's organized the passage so that his interpretations gain yet more of the appearance of impartiality, bracketed and set off as they are by "partisan attacks."

If the document release is partial—as indisputably it is, however Stevenson spins away from the fact—then it simply cannot show, by any reasonable standard of evidence, that "in the end" the Administration was reluctant to endorse the torture of prisoners. ("In the end" is a particularly foolish turn of phrase, given that the document dump doesn't extend beyond the spring of 2003, i.e. before pretty much everything that happened in the Iraq gulag had happened. See Billmon for more on the subject. Stevenson nowhere in his article makes it clear just what the extent of the document dump is, or what the relevant timelines are.) And I doubt that even the power of the Times gives Stevenson magical insight into the motives that might have driven the White House (imagine, being able to gauge the motives of an entire institution of government!) to make the document release. Again, and stripped of its rhetorical heat, Pat Leahy's statement points to a more genuinely objective context for thinking about the Administration's motives, appealing as it does to the public history of the controversy, than Stevenson's wholly undeserved compliment to the White House's "sense" of the scandal's gravity and its commitment to "disclosure."

All of which is to say, when I call Richard Stevenson an Administration propagandist, I use the term advisedly. Is the objectivity game still worth playing, for the press? (Jay Rosen has a discussion at PressThink that bears usefully on the question.) That's a thornier issue than I can address now. But caveat lector: if you read Stevenson from within the rules of that game, you're setting yourself up for a dupe. For Stevenson, "objectivity" is just a handy way of stacking the deck for Bush & Co.

posted by michael  12:52:58 PM  
tell me about it []