The New York Times offered a distorted glimpse into the prison at
Guantanamo Bay and the Bush administration's treatment of suspected
terrorists in a series of reports published on Sunday and Monday.
Scouring hundreds of leaked military documents, Times reporters used
emotionally-charged phrases and cherry-picked anecdotes to paint an
unflattering picture of the facility that has jailed hundreds of enemy
combatants captured in the War on Terror.
In a story headlined [1]
"Judging Detainees' Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence," reporters Scott
Shane and Benjamin Weiser accused the military of imprisoning "hundreds
of men for years without a trial based on a difficult and strikingly
subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past
and what they might do in the future."
While it is factually correct to note that some jihadists have been
locked up for years without a trial, it is hardly the place of
ostensibly objective reporters to employ terms like "strikingly
subjective" to describe the process of conducting risk assessments.
Shane and Weiser also opined that the U.S. detention camp is nothing
more than a "lottery" where the "tiniest details" were "seized upon" by
military analysts "as a potential litmus test for risk."
After revealing a number of cases in which the military "sometimes
ignored serious flaws in the evidence," the intrepid reporters engaged
in blatant political activism, calling for an independent investigation:
"Such frustrating case studies seem to beg for an independent
evaluation of the evidence, some way of shedding light on the quality of
the Guantanamo analysts' work."
In another [2]
piece, Charlie Savage, William Glaberson, and Andrew Lehren portrayed
enemy combatants as victims who "fought back" against the Bush
administration's harsh interrogation techniques:
Yet for all the limitations of the files, they still offer an
extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its
secrecy and for a struggle between the military that runs it - using
constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and other tools to
exert control - and detainees who often fought back with the limited
tools available to them: hunger strikes, threats of retribution and
hoarded contraband ranging from a metal screw to leftover food.
The Times was eager to discuss "America's most controversial prison,"
but unwilling to refer to the group that leaked the classified files,
WikiLeaks, as anything more than an "anti-secrecy organization," even
though critics accuse [3] the organization of being overly secretive with its own finances.
Ending their stories on a somber note, Shane and Weiser lamented the
"haunting conclusion" of the leaked files, while Savage, Glaberson, and
Lehren decried "an American limbo."
- Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here [4] to follow him on Twitter.
