behind the news

The Washington Post Gets Scooped – On Purpose?

November 3, 2005

Yesterday we wrote about the Washington Post‘s decision not to disclose the “Eastern European democracies” in which the CIA set up its clandestine “black sites” — interrogation centers where U.S. laws do not apply to the treatment of suspected terrorists. We wondered if the fact that the CIA was operating inside “democracies” with their own laws didn’t defeat the purpose.

The Post wrote that its decision to hide the names had to do with security concerns — worries that terrorists might then target those countries. We thought this was reasonable, but also wondered to ourselves how long it would be before some other enterprising news outlet would figure out which countries were in question and print their names.

Well, it didn’t take long. The Financial Times reported today that research from Human Rights Watch indicates that Poland and Romania are the countries playing host to the interrogation camps. And as the Times noted, “Poland’s role, if confirmed, would be especially controversial, given that it has recently joined the European Union.”

Putting aside what we said yesterday about the implications of this news (i.e. “The president may have broken the law by allowing the CIA to interrogate and detain suspects in countries where its methods are clearly illegal”), perhaps we were too easy on the Post for acceding to the government’s request that it not disclose the countries involved.

One Washington foreign policy analyst, Peter Kornbluh, told us, “This is probably the most important newspaper capitulation since [the New York Times] yielded to JFK’s call for them not to run the full story of planning for the Bay of Pigs. By withholding the country names, the Post is directly enabling the rendition, secret detention, and torture of prisoners at these locations to continue. That is a ghastly responsibility.”

To Kornbluh, it’s moot that the Financial Times came along and filled in the holes the Post left in its account. We’re not so sure. The editors of the Post have been around the block a few times; they must have known it was inevitable that this information would come out. From outside looking in, it appears their motive was not to keep the information secret, but rather to avoid being the first to expose the location of the “black sites.”

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What we do know is that the Post is trying to have it both ways: Getting credit for breaking the story, without breaking the specific details that might have caused it grief from the CIA.

Which raises an old question: Is it the job of a newspaper to tell us what it knows — or to bend over backwards to hide information from us?

We think we know our answer.

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.