I’m reluctant to criticize the work of other journalists, and especially that of investigative journalists, because as a reader I usually don’t know enough about the subject matter, or the sources, or the corroborating work that shaped the story in question. But this Washington Post piece, which makes bold claims about the efficacy of waterboarding, bothered me for various reasons. It burned up the blogosphere over the weekend and was a kind of overture to Dick Cheney’s appearance on Fox News Sunday.
My complaint has more to do with the context, or lack of it, than with the content of the story itself. But in this case, context is everything.
The story is titled “How a Detainee Became an Asset: Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding.” And that’s pretty much its only point, gleaned mainly from interviews with anonymous sources and a few lines from CIA reports released last week: waterboarding done on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 plotter, made him cooperate and yield valuable information about al Qaeda.
What happened in KSM’s interrogations is historically and legally significant, and thus politically controversial – hugely so. This story, however, treats its subject matter not from that perspective but as a daily scoop, advancing the story of the week – the release of the CIA’s torture documents and Cheney’s response.
And in that sense, the biggest problem here is opacity. We don’t know who the Post’s anonymous sources are. But we do know what bureaucratic or political agendas they are seeking to advance by talking about this case right now. The CIA is embarrassed and facing a Justice Department investigation. So some elements within the agency – and especially those who participated directly in this program – have a political and legal interest in trying to paint the “EITs” (the official acronym for enhanced interrogation techniques – who knew?) as successful. As do Dick Cheney and his various acolytes. This undermines the story’s credibility, yet the Post basically asks us to take the statements of its anonymous sources at face value.
There’s also the timing. The story appeared the day before a scheduled Cheney interview, and bolstered his arguments (which are not real arguments but demagogic assertions, which in my mind damages whatever actual, utilitarian case might be made for torture). When I saw it I thought instantly of how the Bush administration had played the New York Times with the “aluminum tubes” story. In 2002, “senior administration officials” strategically leaked disputed information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged (and, as it turned out, nonexistent) nuclear program to the Times, then used the NYT’s own story to bolster the case for war. Here’s the NYT’s own retrospective account:
“On Sept. 8., the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program.
”The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical and biological weapons,” a senior administration official was quoted as saying. ”Nuclear weapons are his hole card.”
The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.
The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times’ article. The morning it was published, Mr. Cheney went on the NBC News program ”Meet the Press” and confirmed when asked that the tubes were the most alarming evidence behind the administration’s view that Iraq had resumed its nuclear weapons program. The tubes, he said, had ”raised our level of concern.” Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, went on CNN and said the tubes ”are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.”
After the tubes incident, I never read an intelligence-related story quite the same way again. Did the Post allow itself to be manipulated here in exchange for a scoop? Cheney didn’t mention the Post story in his interview – whew! But clearly, something went wrong here. The scoop here doesn’t tell us anything about the efficacy of torture in producing reliable information – even in KSM’s case, for that matter. If a scoop actually obscures the issue at hand, what good is it?
