Winner: The New York Times’s Scott Shane. Just four months after remarks of F.B.I. director Robert Mueller were published on vanityfair.com, two days after FCP asked Shane’s editor why they had never been reported in the Times, and one day after FCP wrote about them for the third time, the intrepid Timesman finally picked up the telephone and called the F.B.I. to find out whether Mueller had really said that he did not believe that torture had produced any information that disrupted attacks on the U.S. “The quote is accurate,” an F.B.I. spokesman confirmed, and Shane, today, finally managed to get that story into the Times.
Sinner: Scott Shane. Unfortunately, the same reporter spent much of the rest of today’s “news analysis” repeating the dubious claims of Bush, Cheney, and four former C.I.A. directors who assert that torture did produce important information.
Question: Why hasn’t Shane made the same elemental observation that a fine New York Times editorial made today: “Mr. Cheney claims that the waterboarding saved thousands of lives. Most accounts that don’t come from officials involved in the formation of those policies suggest that that is not the case”?
Answer: The people writing Times editorials are much better journalists than most of the reporters writing about torture for the news department. On most days, Shane exhibits the same degree of skepticism towards official sources that Judith Miller did during the run-up to the Iraq War.
Winner: Rachel Maddow, who actually understands what the torture debate is about. If you watched either of the interviews she conducted last night with author Ron Suskind or American interrogator Colonel Seven Kleinman, you learned more relevant facts about this subject than you would by reading a month’s worth of stories in The New York Times:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
[Maddow with Suskind]
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
[Maddow with Colonel Steven Kleinman]
Here is a key passage of Maddow’s interview with Kleinman:
Maddow: Why would SERE methods be used in interrogation, if they were known to be used to have been designed to elicit false confessions?
Kleinman: At the very senior levels of government, surprisingly, the understanding of the complexities of interrogation is rare. It really is. It’s probably shaped more by the television show 24 than by practitioners of the art. There are a lot of people who don’t understand the difference between a model that would train people to resist harsh interrogation—and the purpose of that was to compel people to produce propaganda—and intelligence interrogation, which is designed to elicit cooperation and therefore timely, accurate, and comprehensive intelligence. They appear almost similar on the surface but there’s a very profound difference, and those two cannot be crossed.
Maddow: Defenders of the Bush administration interrogation program say that these harsh techniques were only used in extremely controlled circumstances on a very small number of people by only highly trained personnel. It was an elite practice. Does that accord to what you saw in Iraq and how you know these techniques were used?
Kleinman: Not at all. First of all, it is not an elite practice. ’Enhanced interrogation technique’—that term would connote an elite program, an advanced program, one conducted by sophisticated practitioners—and nothing could be further from the truth. The best interrogators in this country understand how to interrogate. And that’s largely a relationship-based, culturally elite, finessed approach. It’s systematic and it’s patient. That’s what produces information. To use SERE methods, or to think that one can use physicality or heavy stress to produce useful, reliable information is just a misnomer. It’s not backed up by operational experience, and it’s not backed up by one shred of scientific evidence.
Which is why statements like this one, in the story Shane and Mark Mazzetti wrote yesterday (and which led the paper!), are simply nonsensical:
Whether the same information could have been acquired using the traditional, noncoercive methods that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military have long used is impossible to say, and former Bush administration officials say they did not have the luxury of time to develop a more patient approach, given that they had intelligence warnings of further attacks.
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How about a sinner for Rachel Maddow spending a week making tea bag puns and talking down to tea-partiers? (See The Daily Howler) She should use it as a teachable moment instead of bringing Ana Marie Cox on to make ridiculous sex puns.
#1 Posted by Some Guy, CJR on Thu 23 Apr 2009 at 07:48 PM
Literally the ONLY place I have heard or read about the difference between the actual goals of SERE training and the bizarre reengineering of it for torture training is on The Rachel Maddow show. This is appalling.
#2 Posted by Sarah Burke, CJR on Fri 24 Apr 2009 at 08:12 AM
If there is a more predictable and mechanical writer in the CJR stable than this Kaiser, I haven't seen him or her - even Trudy Leiberman is not quite as politically dogmatic under the phony guise of 'journalistic' critiques. If Kaiser really hates people who question conventional (i.e., 1968-vintage) urban liberal ideology as much as he robotically seems to, he has a fabulous weapon at his disposal. He can actually write a 'Winners and Sinners' column that concedes that sometimes liberals are wrong and conservatives are right - it is a complex world - and his conservative opponents will drop dead in amazement at such a concession. Of course, the liberals might die of blogger apoplexy, too, so there is that risk.
As it is, I could write this guy's hackwork myself - easily. I'll do it for half the price. How about it, CJR?
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 24 Apr 2009 at 03:08 PM
And yet, Mark, just four days ago, Kaiser devoted an entire blog to an attack on....the Obama administration: http://www.cjr.org/full_court_press/above_the_fold_stuck_in_the_lo.php.
I guess that's the one you think you could have written yourself.
Careful readers like you give the right the reputation it so richly deserves. And I used to think you were such a cool guy!
#4 Posted by Rick Whitaker, CJR on Sat 25 Apr 2009 at 11:23 AM
Was the attack in 'Winners and Sinners'? That's all I read by Kaiser, and I specifically name-checked it. It is true that a number of people on the Left are protecting Obama's flank by attacking him for insufficient devotion to the ideology of the generic Mother Jones reader. Bush was sometimes attacked from his Right, too. If Kaiser has ever conceded in 'Winners and Sinners' that a left-wing point of view, for example the notorious coverage of the Duke-Lacrosse case by the NY Times, has resulted in poor coverage, or noted that journalism which appears to support a GOP talking point may turn out to be correct, I haven't seen it.
#5 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 27 Apr 2009 at 01:54 PM
I was not yet blogging about the press when the New York Times was writing about the Duke-Lacrosse case. If I had been, I certainly would have excoriated their coverage.
It was reprehensible.
#6 Posted by Charles Kaiser, CJR on Wed 29 Apr 2009 at 05:58 PM
To Charles Kaiser:
Point taken, and thanks for reading. I'm glad you agree that the Times' coverage of the case was reprehensible, though I suspect you may be reluctant to concede that it may be a metaphor for the Times' generally worthless and untrustworthy journalism on any issue bearing on 'identity' politics - which covers a lot of ground in American politics. Anyway, my respect-level just went up a degree.
However, I think my advice is sound - 'Winners and Sinners' is predictably partisan, and holds no interest for readers who don't share the rather urban-stereotypical viewpoint. There is not that much qualitative difference between your column and, say, that of Brent Bozell. The difference is that Brent Bozell is not featured by CJR, which professes to be primarily a journalism review rather than a political pulpit.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 30 Apr 2009 at 01:15 PM