Yesterday, FCP focused on a New York Times story about Barack Obama’s search for a new CIA director. Top candidate John O. Brennan had removed himself from consideration for the post after being accused of complicity in the policy which allowed the torturing of prisoners by CIA agents.
I attacked the story because I thought I thought it read like a press release written by past and present CIA officials, determined to head off an investigation of torture abuses.
When I interviewed Mark Mazzetti, who wrote the Times piece with Scott Shane, I told him that one reason the piece struck me as deficient was that it barely balanced the views of the CIA officials it quoted. Mazzetti replied by pointing to the middle section of the story: “We quoted two leading Democratic senators who, we were interested to hear, that they professed some—you know—a degree of flexibility on this subject. Not flexibility—they seem to take a different stance, or a slightly more nuanced stance than they had over the past year—so we quoted both of them.”
The senators were Ron Wyden of Oregon and Dianne Feinstein of California—but it turns out that Feinstein is not as flexible as the Times indicated. This was what was presented in yesterday’s story as evidence of Senator Feinstein’s new “flexibility” toward allowing torture in interrogations:
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush. But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures. Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.
But that wasn’t everything Feinstein told the Times. Spencer Ackerman reported today in The Washington Independent that the Times omitted the final sentence in the statement Feinstein issued—a sentence which alters the thrust of her remarks quite dramatically:
“However,” Feinstein said, “my intent is to pass a law that effectively bans torture, complies with all laws and treaties, and provides a single standard across the government.”
A spokesman for Feinstein told FCP today that the senator is now demanding a “clarification” from the Times to learn why that sentence was omitted.
Harper’s contributing editor Scott Horton, who has blogged extensively on this subject, said this about the Times’s omission: “I think this disclosure only serves to underscore the overarching question about this piece. What was the news purpose of this piece? It seems to have been the vehicle for manufactured or false news.”
FCP queried executive editor Bill Keller, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet, standards editor Craig Whitney, and reporters Mazzetti and Shane about who had made the decision to distort the senator’s remarks by omitting that sentence. FCP also asked if there would be an editor’s note in tomorrow’s paper explaining what had happened. So far, only Whitney has responded, saying he would “find out” if there would be an editor’s note tomorrow, “but it might take longer than that….”
A former top editor of the Times told FCP today that the error required a corrective story, not just an editor’s note. FCP is quite sure about what would happen to the editor or reporter responsible for distorting Feinstein’s position if his former boss, the late Abe Rosenthal, were still the executive editor of The New York Times.
That person would be fired.
Postscript: Scott Shane called FCP after this was posted and said he didn’t see how the omission of that sentence changed the meaning of Feinstein’s statement. Which led to this exchange:
FCP: Why did you leave it out?Shane: Well, we left out tons of things. She talked for a long, long time.
FCP: Well, the trouble with leaving out this sentence is that it makes your whole story look phony. And I’m sorry that you don’t understand that.
Shane: Well, you guys are all dicing and slicing this story in various ways. But a couple of your blogging colleagues read it the other way, and said that the last sentence reinforces…
FCP: They’re entitled to their opinion, and you’re entitled to yours.
He says he can't understand how omitting that last sentence changed the meaning? That was like her bottom line. Either he does understand, or he doesn't. I doubt its the latter. Either way, it's pretty sad.
Posted by Bill Bergman on Thu 4 Dec 2008 at 07:00 PM
This is good reporting by Charles Kaiser. For all intents and purposes, at The New York Times, they do not do the English language, so editorial disasters are quite possible. The lack of sensitivity to language is as routine as for Alan M. Dershowitz, some of whose provocative statements on torture found favor with Barry Gewen in The New York Times Paper Cuts blog. If you were to point out that these reckless statements might draw unwanted attention to Harvard as a terrorist target, then Paper Cuts quite possibly would just not bother publishing your comment.
It is important to test all the systems as Kaiser is doing, because in many cases they are in disarray. The New York Times should require far more reading by editors and reporters, and take far more care with language. The paper should publish an official list of English language books that would also be valuable for intelligence and international relations education. It seems impossible to believe that such incredibly good books as the Longman Advanced American Dictionary, the Longman Language Activator, and the COBUILD English Grammar are ignored by those who think there is some meaning in the GRE or TOEFL.
Editorial and intelligence systems need to be constantly tested, but far more powerfully. An indicative case is the bizarre performance of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. According to Politico44 (Jen DiMascio), the President of CSIS, John J. Hamre, "could become the CIA director or the director of national intelligence, sources say...". (But also see Craig Gordon and Ben Smith at Politico).
Readers should consult the CSIS senior associate Edward Luttwak's "Ten men willing to die, and pathetic security (Why this wouldn't occur in Tel Aviv, New York or London)" at the site of The Globe and Mail Opinions. This is a beautiful sample of CSIS work since not only was Luttwak's interpretation refuted by a story that had already appeared the previous evening in the UK (see The Independent, "Fear of Mumbai-style attack prompts UK security review," by Kim Sengupta, but also David Ignatius in The Washington Post, "The Next Mumbai," has effectively refuted the Luttwak analysis for America. No apparent qualification was posted at the online Globe and Mail commentary. Nor did The Globe and Mail allow any comment at this commentary.
Luttwak responded briefly to my e-mail to him, but he has not replied to my follow-up e-mail, nor has he taken any notice of Sengupta and Ignatius as far as I can see. CSIS is not performing a rapid and accurate international media reading cycle. The CSIS website is an old-fashioned mess. The ways of responding to documented concerns about CSIS information mismanagement are hopeless.
John Hamre and Bill Keller would make excellent partners for the next four years. One in an advanced intelligence position that would wrap circles around him, and the other well in over his head as the executive editor of one of the three most important papers in America.
Dizzyingly strange. One an idol of 1950's intelligence information flow, and his counterpart a killer-keller of sensitive national security text.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Fri 5 Dec 2008 at 12:25 AM
Charles Kaiser is now being criticized by top progressive blogger, Salon.com's legend Glen Greenwald, who does not understand why Kaiser makes a big deal about the omitted sentence, because it does not change the fact that Feinstein never spoke of exemptions to the Army Manual until she made the recent remarks in question.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/05/torture/index.html
Posted by Andrew Perez on Fri 5 Dec 2008 at 10:16 PM
Thanks, Andrew. It looks like Greenwald makes the same error/spin that Shane did, e.g. she talked for a long time, and you have to draw the line somewhere. But the sentence that was omitted wasn t part of a conversatio, it was an integral part of a seperate statement. It looks highly suspect that it was left out to make Feinstein look different than what she meant, and deliberately so.
Posted by Bill Bergman on Fri 5 Dec 2008 at 11:14 PM
More important than the last few words of Feinstein's backpedaling away from a firm, specific stance against torture: Feinstein has previously supported a firm, specific definition of torture-free interrogation that she is no longer so firm or specific about.
Feinstein is now less firm and less specific about opposing torture than she was when she teased Bush into vetoing a torture ban. That's newsworthy, and that news is neither strengthened nor weakened by the reporters' omission of Feinstein's vague statement of "intent," which is a word that senators use to indicate their willingness, even their plan, to lose an argument.
“my intent is to pass a law that effectively bans torture, complies with all laws and treaties, and provides a single standard across the government.”
That just doesn't sound like a senator who wants to make a commitment to anything specific. And that's what the story said. So I think those fellas ought to keep their jobs.
Posted by Mark Kind on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 12:19 AM
This isn't about Feinstein. That's not the point. Call her person X. This is simply about the deliberate manipulation of the message sent by X to present the person in a way the reporters wanted to present the person. The reporters weren't reporting, they were participating. Horton's line re: "manufactured or false news" seems on the money. Their jobs? That's another matter. But defend what they did? No.
Posted by Bill Bergman on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 10:08 AM
Here's what the reporters quoted Person X saying:
“The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them."
That quote, which they included, does a far better job of allowing Person X to specifically defend his/her anti-torture credentials, such as they are, than does the quote that was left out:
"“However,” Person X said, “my intent is to pass a law that effectively bans torture, complies with all laws and treaties, and provides a single standard across the government.”
In fact, in his/her objections to the reporting that characterized her as flexible on how, specifically, torture should be banned, Person X is repeating a quote that truly portrays a more "flexible" position than the quote that the reporters actually used, all the while arguing that Person X is not, in fact, more flexible than he/she had been.
Posted by Mark Kind on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 11:58 AM
I'm intrigued by this dust-up. It's a fairly standard newsroom drama: A source feels his or her position needs to be "clarified."
Reminds me of the time a distressed teen called my city desk and complained that my newspaper had wrongly alleged that a car that looked like hers was at the scene of a shooting. I told her that if that was true, I wanted to try to figure out how to correct any impression that she'd been present at the scene of the shooting. "Oh I was there," she said. "My car wasn't."
Here, Sen. Feinstein is offering something different to Barack Obama than she demanded from George Bush. From Bush, as a safeguard against torture, she wanted compliance with the Army Field Manual, a demand that Bush vetoed. From Obama, Feinstein wants safeguards against torture, but nothing specific.
Now, Feinstein is ostensibly complaining that she hasn't really become more flexible about the Army Field Manual as a safeguard against torture, and the NYT story is wrong about that flexibility allegation. But the quote Feinstein complains was omitted restates her flexibility with extraordinary clarity, failing to mention the specific Army Field Manual with which she'd previously demanded Bush's compliance.
Basically, this is a source who no longer wants to commit to any particular safeguard against torture, but who expects reporters to portray her as an ardent foe of torture.
This is a standard conflict between political sources and reporters: The political source voices vague platitudes, the reporter reports that the political source failed to embrace specifics, and the source complains about the coverage. It's disheartening to see a journalism watchdog take the side of the obfuscating source against the reporters who noticed and reported the obfuscation.
Posted by Mark Kind on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 12:31 PM
This is my comment for the latest Scott/Mark account of the Feinstein matter. Scott and Mark: It seems to me that two issues remain unresolved. 1.What exactly did Feinstein say when she mentioned the dirty bomb and other dire circumstances? Could you give a detailed account? Is she prone to thinking out loud, so that she qualifies her ideas about policy without really grasping that the way her responses are perceived can generate unwanted ambiguities? Then we can have chains of ambiguity, so that it seems as if Obama himself might be having second thoughts about "alternatives," perhaps involving torture in certain circumstances. Text is volatile in political contexts. Does Feinstein fully grasp that, or is she helpless to prevent herself from ruminating?
2.Are Scott and Mark fully aware of the potential ambiguities of interpretation and presentation in their own work? In quoting Feinstein on a hypothetical "alternative" to her legislation, which you then seem to alter to "alternatives" the president-elect might favor, you fail to pin down whether you mean alternative ways of achieving a no-torture policy or alternatives to forbidding torture. You should have explored and resolved this ambiguity by putting the question specifically to Feinstein and Obama. It is up to Obama to show leadership by clearing this matter up. If he does not, then he is happy enough with sloppy ambiguities, or he just does not understand the linguistic issues.
— Clayton Burns
Posted by Clayton Burns on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 02:16 PM
This Telegraph report at the website now from Tim Shipman in Washington may turn out to throw backlight on Feinstein's statements in The New York Times:
The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that, in conversations with Western diplomats, Mr Obama’s senior aides have made clear that he will announce the closure of the Guantánamo Bay facility and an end to torture as soon as he is sworn in, perhaps in his inauguration speech.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 07:57 PM