Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  While it seized on any evidence of malfeasance on the part of U.S. servicemen and women, the Times also disparaged or ignored instances of heroism. For example, when the former NFL football star Pat Tillman died after his unit of Army Rangers in Afghanistan came under friendly fire, it was a tragedy, and the Army commanders who tried to obscure the details in order to create a heroic narrative were deeply wrong. But could the whole, sad tale be reduced, as one Times editorial said, to a “bogus” story of heroism “used to bolster support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”? Was it so awful that his memorial service was “patriotism-drenched,” as Frank Rich put it? And just when did “friendly fire” become synonymous with “fratricide,” a much darker word that the Times used liberally in almost all of its Tillman stories?

  While the Times was quick to cover such unfortunate incidents and do scores of stories involving abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, TimesWatch noted that by the end of October 2007, the paper had reported on only two of the twenty men who had been awarded the Air Force Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor. Nevertheless, the Times complained about a dearth of Medals of Honor awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a May 2010 Sunday magazine story titled “What Happened to Valor?” It went into bitter detail describing how the Pentagon had denied the nation’s highest military decoration to Marine Sergeant Rafael Peralta, who had come from Mexico with his family as a teenager. It did bestow the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor, which his mother refused to accept.

  Thus it was all the more egregious when the Times did not acknowledge the military heroism of Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a Navy Seal from Patchogue, Long Island. Ambushed in Afghanistan in June 2005, Murphy crawled into the open to radio for help, further exposing himself to enemy fire. He was killed, but his self-sacrifice led to the rescue of one of his men. Murphy became the first Medal of Honor winner in the Afghan conflict. (The story is retold vividly in Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor.) The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times ran reports on Murphy’s posthumous Medal of Honor commendation in October 2007, as did the Daily News, the New York Post and Newsday. But the Times ran nothing, even though the story had an obvious “local hero” rationale. An editorial in the New York Post noted that on the same day the Times failed to report on Murphy, “No fewer than three stories reported on how Americans had killed innocent Iraqi civilians.”

  The Times’ alienation from military culture comes across in more subtle ways as well. In November 2005, a profile marking the two-thousandth military death in Iraq featured Marine Corporal Jeffrey Starr of Washington State, who was killed in Ramadi on his third tour of duty. As James Dao reported, “Sifting through Corporal Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine’s girlfriend. ‘I kind of predicted this,’ Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. ‘A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.’” This short passage from Starr’s letter was presented in a way to make him seem like a prescient and pessimistic victim of an overextended military. But Dao left out an important part of the letter, showing how Starr wanted his death to be perceived in the event he didn’t return:I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here trying to help these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

  In an interview, James Dao defended his handling of the extract from Starr’s letter, claiming he had captured its essence. In response, the New York Post wrote, “There is saintliness in a soldier’s prospective acceptance of an honorable death in combat. To diminish such a deed, especially in service of a political agenda, approaches sacrilege.”

  The war in Iraq is winding down, our combat troops now withdrawn. What will happen in Afghanistan is still not clear. What is certain, though, is that “the war over the war” will remain a contentious aspect of our national politics. It is playing out in the most polarized way through continuing debates over what some call “torture,” others call “detainee abuse,” and still others see as the necessary evils of a fight against a barbaric enemy from an alien moral universe. In large measure, the fight over “torture” has also been a way to fight about how the United States will defend itself when the threat is from individual actors more than massed troops. The Times’ opposition to the War on Terror and to the Iraq conflict lives on through this unending argument about the “tortures” inflicted on terror suspects and the alleged corruption to the national soul resulting from the use of dehumanizing methods of detention and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, as well as the CIA’s various “black sites.”

  The first round in the torture debate centered on Abu Ghraib. The abuses there were serious, representing a corrosion of military discipline and a propaganda coup for America’s enemies, who saw pictures of Iraqi detainees on leashes, with women’s underwear on their heads, stacked naked on top of each other, or standing on a box while “wired” to simulate imminent electrocution. Frank Rich characterized Abu Ghraib as the equivalent of My Lai—even though Seymour Hersh, who broke both stories, said it didn’t come close. The main problem with the Times’ coverage was overkill, making Abu Ghraib a metaphor for the whole of a complex enterprise. After the photographs were discovered and Hersh’s exposé was published in the New Yorker, at least fifty-three reports on Abu Ghraib appeared on the front page of the Times. Some press critics saw it as an orgy rather than news coverage. As Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote, Abu Ghraib was “a real story that got blown into a month-long bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq.”

  The most extreme moment in the Times’ coverage and commentary on Abu Ghraib was a long Sunday magazine essay by Susan Sontag, which seemed to fulfill Bernard Goldberg’s insight that “To the anti-war crowd, what happened at Abu Ghraib was not a tragedy but more an opportunity—one more chance to reveal America as depraved and dishonorable.” Sontag wrote, “The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts, but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely. Considered in this light, the photographs [of the abused prisoners] are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration’s distinctive policies.” Sontag went on to charge that “The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle” promoted by the Bush administration. Lynching photographs from the American South were “souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done,” Sontag declared. “So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.”

  In its eagerness to ladle out bad ink about Abu Ghraib, the Times fell for a hoax. On March 11, 2006, in a long front-page article accompanied by several pictures, Hassan M. Fattah reported from Baghdad on the human rights activism of one Ali Shalal Qaissi. Under the headline “Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare,” Fattah wrote that Qaissi had been the prisoner at Abu Ghraib who was photographed in a hood, standing on a box, with wires dangling from his body. Fattah called this picture “the indelible symbol of torture at Abu Ghraib.” He reported that Qaissi was now an activist who had joined a lawsuit against U.S. military contractors, was lobbying on behalf of those still in custody, and was barnstorming the major Arab capitals to publicize U.S. mistreatment of Iraqis with the infamous photo on his business card.

  Within days, Salon magazine posted a challenge to the report’s veracity, based on more than 250 images of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse it had obtained and related documents. Qaissi was not the man in the hood, Salon claimed. On March 23, the Times published an editor’s
note confessing to having been suckered, and admitting that a more thorough examination of previous articles in the Times and other newspapers would have shown that military investigators in 2004 had named another man as the one on the box.

  Round two of the torture debate was the crusade to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. According to the Times editorial page, most of the detainees there were “hapless foot soldiers,” either caught up in the chaos in Afghanistan or sold out by unscrupulous countrymen who wanted to settle a score. The Times claimed that the enhanced interrogations of the detainees yielded no real information of any exigent value that saved lives or illuminated al-Qaeda’s plans. In one report, Lizette Alvarez quoted Amnesty International saying that Guantanamo represented “the gulag of our time.” (Trying to define the gulag, she said it was a Stalinist system that killed “thousands,” when in fact it killed millions.)

  In early 2009, the Times also dismissed the Guantanamo recidivism rate—the number of released detainees who returned to terrorism—as “little more than public relations for the Guantanamo Center.” A few months later, in May, the Pentagon leaked a classified report, ironically to the Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller, estimating that one in seven of the 534 prisoners already released from Gitmo “are engaged in terrorism or militant activity.” The story led to an editor’s note, a critical public editor’s column, and a kind of corrective op-ed. The basic line was that not all the suspected recidivists had been involved in jihad to begin with, and not all were confirmed to have returned to jihad. According to the public editor, Clark Hoyt, “Had only confirmed cases been considered, one in seven would have changed to one in 20.”

  Colonel Gordon Cucullu, author of Inside Gitmo, maintains that information gleaned from detainees in the program helped break up plots in Lackawanna, Cleveland and Hamburg, and that the Saudi program for rehabilitating former Gitmo detainees—which was examined favorably in a November 2008 Times Magazine piece called “Deprogramming Jihadists,” by Katherine Zoepf—was little more than “art therapy.” One graduate of the Saudi program soon became the deputy leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen and is suspected of involvement in the deadly bombing of the U.S. embassy in Sana, capital of Yemen, in September 2008. Two others were involved in recruiting and training the Nigerian Christmas Bomber who tried to blow up an airliner in 2009. In an interview, Cucullu maintained that many news organizations, such as the Times, refuse to look at the pathological hatred and violence among detainees, which have required tough interrogation methods and have resulted in numerous injuries to the facility’s personnel. Instead, the Times “castigates the soldiers and sailors who work there,” Cucullu said. “Everyone Is Lynndie England” (the infamous Abu Ghraib leash-lady).

  The Times has worked hard to promote the notion that “torture doesn’t work.” But as the Atlantic’s military expert Robert Kaplan and many others have pointed out, it has worked in places like Algeria during the rebellion against the French, in the Philippines in the government’s struggle against Muslim separatists, and in Dubai against al-Qaeda. Kaplan noted that a captured al-Qaeda manual advises Muslim prisoners that people in the West don’t have the stomach for torture “because they are not warriors.”

  After the 2008 election, all the Times’ pent-up hostility to the Bush administration exploded in its coverage of the recriminations over policies on “torture” during the previous six years. The Times cheered when President Obama released the so-called “torture memos” detailing previously classified information on CIA interrogation methods; “Memos Spell Out Brutal CIA Mode of Interrogation,” its front-page headline screamed. When Obama gave his May 2009 speech on terrorism and detention policy, the editorial board expressed “relief and optimism,” saying that for seven years “President George W. Bush tried to frighten the American public—and successfully cowed Congress—with bullying and disinformation.” Obama, said the editors, “was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values. By denying those values, the Bush team fed the furies of anti-Americanism, strengthened our enemies and made the nation more vulnerable.”

  Obama himself had sent a number of signals that while he would be breaking with certain Bush terror policies, there would be no retribution. But the Times wanted blood. When the president announced that he would not be releasing any more pictures similar to those from Abu Ghraib, the Times was dismayed; this would nullify the divisive reckoning it had called for. The paper editorialized that Obama risked “missing the chance to make sure the misdeeds and horrors of the Bush years are never repeated.”

  The news side played its role in the crusade by reporting supportively on the American Civil Liberties Union’s “John Adams Project.” This was an effort to identify CIA agents who used harsh tactics at “black sites” around the world, so that the ACLU’s “clients,” i.e. terror suspects, could better defend themselves at military tribunals. ACLU defense teams were very aggressive, at points trailing CIA agents suspected of being part of the “black sites” program and photographing them in front of their homes so terror suspects could identify their “torturers.”

  The Times celebrated another ACLU case involving a massive Freedom of Information Act request for government documents connected to “battles between the FBI and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the CIA’s overseas prisons.” In his report, Scott Shane seemed to be ecstatic that the ACLU had won access to much more information than it ever hoped for. He did quote Michael Hayden, former CIA director, who believed that releasing top-secret documents might undermine cooperation from foreign intelligence services who would no longer believe we “can keep a secret.” But the Times did not examine at any length—as other news organizations did—what effects the court cases, the release of sensitive information, or the investigations and potential prosecutions were having on the CIA and other agencies fighting terrorism.

  Besides having their knives out for the CIA, the Times wanted to eviscerate the so-called “torture lawyers” in the Bush administration who had forged the legal reasoning behind the aggressive interrogation techniques. Singled out by the Times were John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury. A May 2009 editorial said, “They deliberately contorted the law to justify decisions that had already been made, making them complicit in those decisions. Their acts were a grotesque abrogation of duty and breach of faith.”

  Perhaps the grimmest assessment of the Obama administration’s war on the counterterror warriors, which the Times cheered at every step, was by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. Citing a “chilling effect” on government lawyers and investigators, and questioning the decision to limit interrogators to “non-coercive” techniques, he wrote, “The war on terror is being downgraded to not much more than tough talk. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranians, not yet converts to the West’s caricature of its own legal traditions, will take note. In time, they will be back.”

  On the question of whether “torture” was immoral, many seasoned commentators saw a gray area, but the Times had no doubts. A story that underscored the paper’s position was a June 2008 profile of Deuce Martinez, the CIA operative who had successfully interrogated the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) at a CIA “black site” in Poland. Martinez was not a member of the clandestine services, but a career analyst; he had no Arabic language training and had refused to join the team involved with harsh interrogation tactics. When he joined the CIA he was assigned to the agency’s Counter-Narcotics Center, “learning to sift masses of phone numbers, travel records, credit card transactions,” as Scott Shane put it. His tool was the computer . . . his expertise was drug cartels and not terrorist networks.” Martinez was moved into the agency’s counterterrorism program when it expanded after 9/11. He enc
ountered KSM in 2003, as the United States readied for war in Iraq. Intelligence officials feared the invasion would precipitate more al-Qaeda attacks, which KSM either knew about or could provide insight into.

  Martinez came in after the rough stuff, “the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English,” Shane reported. “He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers. A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious.” They would have long talks about religion, comparing notes on Islam and Catholicism, one CIA officer recalled, adding another detail that no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.” The story of Martinez and KSM, suggested Shane and the Times, appeared to show that traditional methods alone might have elicited the same information or more from KSM than were obtained by waterboarding.

  In running this profile and using Martinez’s name, however, the Times went against CIA concerns that Martinez would become a target for terrorist retaliation. As in the NSA surveillance case and the SWIFT terror finance story, the Times refused official requests for secrecy; though in an analogous situation when the shoe was on the other foot after Robert Novak “outed” the CIA operative Valerie Plame, the Times had called for heads to roll. The editors said that Martinez’s name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article, and that Martinez was not technically an “undercover” CIA agent—just as partisans on the right had said about Plame.