Gray Lady Down (37 page)

Colonel Gordon Cucullu, author of
Inside Gitmo,
maintains that information gleaned from detainees in the program helped break up plots in Lackawanna, Cleveland and Hamburg, and that the Saudi program for rehabilitating former Gitmo detainees—which was examined favorably in a November 2008
Times Magazine
piece called “Deprogramming Jihadists,” by Katherine Zoepf—was little more than “art therapy.” One graduate of the Saudi program soon became the deputy leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen and is suspected of involvement in the deadly bombing of the U.S. embassy in Sana, capital of Yemen, in September 2008. Two others were involved in recruiting and training the Nigerian Christmas Bomber who tried to blow up an airliner in 2009. In an interview, Cucullu maintained that many news organizations, such as the
Times,
refuse to look at the pathological hatred and violence among detainees, which have required tough interrogation methods and have resulted in numerous injuries to the facility’s personnel. Instead, the
Times
“castigates the soldiers and sailors who work there,” Cucullu said. “Everyone Is Lynndie England” (the infamous Abu Ghraib leash-lady).

The
Times
has worked hard to promote the notion that “torture doesn’t work.” But as the
Atlantic
’s military expert Robert Kaplan and many others have pointed out, it has worked in places like Algeria during the rebellion against the French, in the Philippines in the government’s struggle against Muslim separatists, and in Dubai against al-Qaeda. Kaplan noted that a captured al-Qaeda manual advises Muslim prisoners that people in the West don’t have the stomach for torture “because they are not warriors.”

After the 2008 election, all the
Times’
pent-up hostility to the Bush administration exploded in its coverage of the recriminations over policies on “torture” during the previous six years. The
Times
cheered when President Obama released the so-called “torture memos” detailing previously classified information on CIA interrogation methods; “Memos Spell Out Brutal CIA Mode of Interrogation,” its front-page headline screamed. When Obama gave
his May 2009 speech on terrorism and detention policy, the editorial board expressed “relief and optimism,” saying that for seven years “President George W. Bush tried to frighten the American public—and successfully cowed Congress—with bullying and disinformation.” Obama, said the editors, “was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values. By denying those values, the Bush team fed the furies of anti-Americanism, strengthened our enemies and made the nation more vulnerable.”

Obama himself had sent a number of signals that while he would be breaking with certain Bush terror policies, there would be no retribution. But the
Times
wanted blood. When the president announced that he would not be releasing any more pictures similar to those from Abu Ghraib, the
Times
was dismayed; this would nullify the divisive reckoning it had called for. The paper editorialized that Obama risked “missing the chance to make sure the misdeeds and horrors of the Bush years are never repeated.”

The news side played its role in the crusade by reporting supportively on the American Civil Liberties Union’s “John Adams Project.” This was an effort to identify CIA agents who used harsh tactics at “black sites” around the world, so that the ACLU’s “clients,” i.e. terror suspects, could better defend themselves at military tribunals. ACLU defense teams were very aggressive, at points trailing CIA agents suspected of being part of the “black sites” program and photographing them in front of their homes so terror suspects could identify their “torturers.”

The
Times
celebrated another ACLU case involving a massive Freedom of Information Act request for government documents connected to “battles between the FBI and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the CIA’s overseas prisons.” In his report, Scott Shane seemed to be ecstatic that the ACLU had won access to much more information than it ever hoped for. He did quote Michael Hayden, former CIA director, who believed that
releasing top-secret documents might undermine cooperation from foreign intelligence services who would no longer believe we “can keep a secret.” But the
Times
did not examine at any length—as other news organizations did—what effects the court cases, the release of sensitive information, or the investigations and potential prosecutions were having on the CIA and other agencies fighting terrorism.

Besides having their knives out for the CIA, the
Times
wanted to eviscerate the so-called “torture lawyers” in the Bush administration who had forged the legal reasoning behind the aggressive interrogation techniques. Singled out by the
Times
were John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury. A May 2009 editorial said, “They deliberately contorted the law to justify decisions that had already been made, making them complicit in those decisions. Their acts were a grotesque abrogation of duty and breach of faith.”

Perhaps the grimmest assessment of the Obama administration’s war on the counterterror warriors, which the
Times
cheered at every step, was by Daniel Henninger of the
Wall Street Journal.
Citing a “chilling effect” on government lawyers and investigators, and questioning the decision to limit interrogators to “non-coercive” techniques, he wrote, “The war on terror is being downgraded to not much more than tough talk. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranians, not yet converts to the West’s caricature of its own legal traditions, will take note. In time, they will be back.”

On the question of whether “torture” was immoral, many seasoned commentators saw a gray area, but the
Times
had no doubts. A story that underscored the paper’s position was a June 2008 profile of Deuce Martinez, the CIA operative who had successfully interrogated the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) at a CIA “black site” in Poland. Martinez was not a member of the clandestine services, but a career analyst; he had no Arabic language training and had refused to join the team involved with harsh interrogation tactics. When he joined the CIA he was assigned to the agency’s Counter-Narcotics Center, “learning to sift masses of phone numbers, travel records, credit card transactions,” as Scott Shane put it. His tool was the computer . . . his
expertise was drug cartels and not terrorist networks.” Martinez was moved into the agency’s counterterrorism program when it expanded after 9/11. He encountered KSM in 2003, as the United States readied for war in Iraq. Intelligence officials feared the invasion would precipitate more al-Qaeda attacks, which KSM either knew about or could provide insight into.

Martinez came in after the rough stuff, “the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English,” Shane reported. “He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers. A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious.” They would have long talks about religion, comparing notes on Islam and Catholicism, one CIA officer recalled, adding another detail that no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.” The story of Martinez and KSM, suggested Shane and the
Times,
appeared to show that traditional methods alone might have elicited the same information or more from KSM than were obtained by waterboarding.

In running this profile and using Martinez’s name, however, the
Times
went against CIA concerns that Martinez would become a target for terrorist retaliation. As in the NSA surveillance case and the SWIFT terror finance story, the
Times
refused official requests for secrecy; though in an analogous situation when the shoe was on the other foot after Robert Novak “outed” the CIA operative Valerie Plame, the
Times
had called for heads to roll. The editors said that Martinez’s name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article, and that Martinez was not technically an “undercover” CIA agent—just as partisans on the right had said about Plame.

The
Times’
ideological bias was on display once more in how it reported on a private memo sent by Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, to his staff in April 2009, affirming that “enhanced techniques” banned by the Obama
White House had in fact yielded important information. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Admiral Blair had written. This disclosure had significant news value, since Blair was not a Bush appointee, and he had sent his memo, according to the
Times
reporter Peter Baker, “on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture.”

Baker’s story on the memo, headlined “Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says,” ran on April 22, but only at 850 words and only on the
Times
website. Two paragraphs of the bombshell online report were shoehorned into a larger story that ran inside the paper with another reporter’s byline, under a headline that reflected nothing pertaining to what Baker had reported (“Obama Won’t Bar Inquiry of Penalty on Interrogations,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg).

Byron York of the
Washington Examiner
interviewed the
Times’
deputy Washington bureau chief, Richard Stevenson, and asked why Baker’s story did not run in the newspaper itself. According to York, Stevenson denied any ideological motivation and blamed deadline pressure and a surfeit of meaty news stories that day.

September 11 left an indelible mark on the American psyche and American politics, animating both the War on Terror as an intellectual construct and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like December 7, it will always, for most Americans, be a day to remember, and to remember in a particular way. Yet it is not obvious that such is also the case at the
New York Times.
Only three years after this national tragedy, the
Times
began nibbling away at its meaning, and since then it has produced a dismissive piece on almost every anniversary of 9/11. Walter Kirn launched the trend on September 12, 2004, in a
Times Magazine
essay titled
“Forget It?” If 9/11 is mostly a way for politicians to manipulate our souls and psyches, Kirn wrote, “Maybe it’s time to move on.”

In May 2005, Frank Rich wrote “Ground Zero Is So Over.” The vacant site, the focus of squabbling over what to rebuild, is a poor memorial for those who died there, Rich charged, “but it’s an all too apt symbol for a war on which the country is turning its back.” Families of the fallen may not “have turned the page,” but other Americans had. As the anniversary neared in August 2006, Rich wrote a column presenting 9/11 as synonymous with a White House effort to “exploit terrorism for political gain.”

There was more of the same in a report by N. R. Kleinfield on the anniversary in 2007, headlined “As 9-11 Draws Near, a Debate Rises: How Much Tribute Is Enough?” Kleinfield wrote, “Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened.... By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.”

In March 2009, David Dunlap reported on the debate to abandon the name “Freedom Tower” for whatever structure eventually goes up at Ground Zero. “That there is a debate at all,” Dunlap wrote in a snappish vein, “suggests how much has changed since the first years after 9/11, when no official pronouncement was complete without an assurance that the attacks, the victims, the rescuers and the survivors would never be forgotten; and when any use of patriotic motifs seemed to be beyond public reproach, no matter how cynical or sentimental.”

Most telling about the
Times’
view of our wars, and about its patriotism, was a very small piece published in 2007 the day after that year’s 9/11 commemoration, just as the surge was gaining momentum in Iraq. Writing about General David Petraeus’s hometown of Cornwall-on-Hudson, Paul Vitello reported that “Some said they were aghast at the dimensions of the problem, some awed by General Petraeus’s seeming grasp of the wildly irregular forces in play; but almost none seemed to foresee a happy result for ‘our side,’ as many in this conservative, Republican-voting place put it.”

Our side
in quotation marks. This expression of internal exile from America said it all. For the
Times,
“our side” was actually “their side,” a foreign place where patriotic Americans lived and which the
Times
had chosen to see as hostile ground.