Charles Kaiser on New York Times torture coverage, and the Spitzer news cycle

Sinners: Scott Shane and Steven Lee Myers wrote two of the most offensive stories I have read in a long time. Both appeared in the New York Times last week after George Bush vetoed Congress' latest attempt to return the United States to the community of civilized nations by banning the CIA (as well as the military) from torturing its prisoners.

The story by Steven Lee Myers framed the debate as if it were almost exclusively about the president's "determination to preserve many of the executive prerogatives his administration has claimed in the name of fighting terrorism, and to enshrine them into law."

Myers quoted the president's frequent (and entirely unverified) claim that "that information from the C.I.A.'s interrogations had averted terrorist attacks." The story mentioned in passing the opposition of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who, like dozens of other active and retired generals and admirals, are unalterably opposed to the use of any technique not included in the Army Field Manual—not only because they believe that torture is completely ineffective, but also because the president's position reflects an absolute contempt for the enormous risks his policy has created for all future American prisoners of war. (In the latest evidence of John McCain's willingness to cravenly curry favor with the extreme right, the Republican front-runner—who himself was tortured by the Vietnamese—endorsed the president's veto, even though he says he remains personally opposed to waterboarding.)

Unlike the far superior story by Dan Eggen in the Washington Post, Myers completely ignored the moral aspects of this debate. Eggen quoted Frank Donaghue, chief executive officer of Physicians for Human Rights, who said that many of the agency's tactics may constitute war crimes.

"America must not be scared into thinking that these 'additional' tactics are anything other than what they are—torture," Donaghue said in a statement.

The Times also ignored the comments of retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who explained that people who support waterboarding "simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about ... if they think these methods work, they're woefully misinformed. Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world."

The next day in the Times Week in Review, Scott Shane wrote an even more disgusting piece, which began by pretending that there was equal moral force on both sides of this debate: "Certainly the debate is rich in emotion, with each side claiming the moral heights: You approve torture! You're coddling terrorists! But the arguments have been scant on science to back them up."

And what is the crucial science that has been ignored? "...[T]he [Army Field] manual's inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decision-making, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator's art either."

By writing about torture in this bloodless way, Myers and Shane act as perfect shills for an administration determined to bury the moral peril of its position.

It's disturbing indeed when the host of a late-night comedy show consistently displays a better grasp of this subject than the Times reporters who are assigned to write about it. Earlier this week, Jon Stewart interviewed Ronald Kessler, a formerly respectable investigative reporter whose latest work, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, is a book-length advertisement for every disgusting thing the Bush administration has done since 9/11.

Needless to say, Kessler is a strong supporter of waterboarding. Like its other advocates, he pretended that the way we did it was more humane than the way the Japanese did it—the Japanese who were prosecuted by the United States after World War II for waterboarding, for war crimes. Stewart ended the interview with the only relevant question in this debate: "What does this do to our soul?"

Spitzer Watch

Winner: Tracy Quan, whose meditation on the sex trade on the Times Op-Ed page was much smarter than anything you heard from a certain Harvard Law professor on Charlie Rose: "Not all sex clients are junkies for risk or adventure-seekers," Quan wrote. "Many are cautious and can't enjoy sex unless they're in a calm, secure environment ... Alan Dershowitz explained away Mr. Spitzer's ill-advised choice by making silly generalizations about men who pay for sex—that they don't use their brains. But I encountered plenty of men who used their brains just fine. From all accounts, Eliot Spitzer doesn't seem to be one of them."

Sinner: Kimberley A. Strassel, for her piece in the Wall Street Journal that blamed the press for enabling Spitzer by never challenging any of his previous excesses as a prosecutor. But ...

Winner: Jack Shafer pointed out in Slate that Strassel had misrepresented several articles as Spitzer puff pieces, which they were not, including Time magazine's December 30, 2002, feature by Adi Ignatius, and Sridhar Pappu's profile in the Atlantic, which Shafer demonstrates were actually quite balanced.

Winner: Sam Roberts, for a characteristically nuanced and sophisticated profile of New York's new governor, David A. Paterson.

Winner: AM New York, for the best headline on this subject: Out With a Bang.

Sinners: The federal prosecutors who waste vast amounts of money exposing the sex lives of public officials.

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	8	6	12
White Women	1	0	2
Black Men	1	0	0
Black Women	1	0	0
Gay People	0	0	0

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.