The clear take-away message of President Bush’s comments in Panama yesterday on torture was his staunch defense of his administration’s interrogation techniques in the war on terror — and various news reports quoted in-depth the president’s assertions that the government’s current treatment of terrorism suspects is lawful and that “We do not torture.”
But when it came to giving their audiences the entirety of the question that prompted the president to expound on such a distasteful topic, some news outlets were more alert than others.
Yesterday, we criticized the Washington Post for failing to address where the president stood on the issue of his vice president’s increasingly lonely fight “to keep the government’s standards of treatment for detainees and those under interrogation as flexible as possible.”
With that in mind, we read with interest a report by the AP of yesterday’s press conference:
“Bush was asked about reports that the CIA was separately maintaining secret prisons in eastern Europe and Asia to interrogate al Qaeda suspects — and demands by the International Red Cross for access to them.”
But there was a third part to the query, as a transcript of the press conference printed by Congresssional Quarterly shows: “And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture?”
Like the AP, a Reuters article explained that Cheney is leading an effort to exempt the CIA from John McCain’s proposed ban on torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners — but did not state that Bush was asked about exactly that before launching into his response. The Post‘s piece also failed to mention that aspect of the question — as did the New York Times, in an otherwise excellent article breaking in extensive detail the news of the Pentagon’s “new policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers.”
The Los Angeles Times did not have as much trouble, writing in its third paragraph, “Bush was responding to a question about reports of secret U.S. detention facilities overseas and efforts by Vice President Dick Cheney to exempt the CIA from a measure that would prohibit the use of torture.” Nor did the Ottawa Citizen, which noted (subscription required) that Bush said “Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people” when he was “asked whether he supported Mr. Cheney’s interventions.”
John Roberts, meanwhile, went so far as to declare straight away in his report on the “CBS Evening News” last night that “President Bush today stood behind the vice president’s effort to exempt the CIA from a congressional ban on torture; critical, he said, to protect the American people from terrorists.”
Clearly, Roberts read Bush’s words much differently than some of his colleagues — as an endorsement of Cheney’s campaign. Obviously, that interpretation was colored by Roberts’ knowledge of precisely the questions to which Bush was responding.
Until the president is pressed to explain specifically his stance on the torture question and his definition of torture, parsing through the thicket of his words will remain difficult.
But those words were not said in a vacuum — and giving readers the full picture of the questions asked allows them to draw their own conclusions.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.