Washington Post = CIA’s PR?
On August 29th, The Washington Post made their case in defense of torture their main story.
When Glen Greenwald of Salon.com read it, the shit hit the proverbial fan:
What makes the Post’s breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims — the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report — provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves. [...]
That the released documents provide no support for Cheney’s claims was so patently clear that many news articles contained unusually definitive statements reporting that to be so. The New York Times reported that the documents Cheney claimed proved his case “do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.” ABC News noted that “the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.” TPM’s Zachary Roth documented that “nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture,” while The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman detailed that, if anything, the documents prove “that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.” As Sargent reported, even Bush’s loyal Terrorism adviser, Frances Fargos Townsend, admitted that the IG Report provides no basis for what the Post today is ludicrously implying:
It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.
Yet The Post today publishes a long, breathless story that, in reality, does little more than claim that (a) Khalid Sheik Mohammed was subjected to “the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods” (not “torture,” of course) and (b) at some point after that, he provided valuable intelligence. At best, it’s nothing more than a statement of obvious chronology, not causation.
Not long after, Ray McGovern of Anti-War.com was even more to the point:
But the story contained some weird contradictions that might have given pause to a less credulous – or less biased – newspaper. For example, the Post’s two unnamed sources who told the tale of Mohammed’s transformation depicted him as anything but a broken man suffering from “learned helplessness,” terrified of more torture. Instead, Mohammed, known as KSM, is described as holding forth like a professor in a lecture hall, pontificating about Greek philosophy and criticizing his American students for their shortcomings. “In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture,” the Post wrote.
So, instead of a cowering figure induced to talk out of fear that he might be subjected to a 184th session of waterboarding, Mohammed appears to be a boastful narcissist who views himself as a historic figure – exactly the sort of interrogation subject who would be susceptible to flattery and other successful, nonviolent strategies favored by experienced FBI interrogators.
If the “learned helplessness” had worked – and was the reason Mohammed was talking – would he really have risked scolding an American interrogator, like an angry teacher chastising an inattentive schoolboy?
However, that is not a question the Post asks or its editors apparently want the readers to think much about. The story is written as if the Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate are seeking expiation for their sins of writing fact-and-document-based stories in recent days.
Back to the Steno Pool
The Post management, it seems, is determined to return to its past practice of acting as stenographers for the CIA’s PR machine. On Sunday, the Post had its steno pad out again, taking dictation about how torture investigations were harming CIA morale. The story, titled “Ex-Intelligence Officials Cite Low Spirits at CIA: IG Report’s Release, Looming Investigation Into Detainee Interrogations Blamed” by Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick, filled nearly half of page two.
The CIA is the only agency of the U.S. government that elicits the Post’s hand-wringing concern about its morale and “spirits.” It’s as if CIA officers were fragile Southern belles at risk of being overcome by “the vapors” if a harsh word is uttered in the parlor.
