Last week, the Times was forced to run a rare and lengthy correction on a poorly reported and misleading front page story about the recidivist rate among released Guanatanamo detainees. That article the paper's public editor Hoyt said in his correction:
...demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.
Hoyt's going to have to fire up his correction pen again. On the very day that his column on the detainee story ran, the Times had a blockbuster leak of a series of e-mails written by James Comey from April of 2005. The Times says:
Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.
Here's the problem. If you read those e-mails, as Marcy and Glenn and I and any number of people with critical reading skills have done, you see that agreeing with the harsh memos is the last thing Comey does.
Marcy:
As I have pointed out in the last two posts, the NYT has a story up claiming that Jim Comey approved of torture, but that grossly misreads the Comey emails on which the story is based. In fact, the memos appear to show that the White House--especially Dick Cheney and David Addington--were pushing DOJ to approve the torture that had been done to Hassan Ghul, without the specificity to record what they had done to him; in fact, one of the things the push on the memos appears to have prevented, was for Comey and Philbin to have actually researched what happened to Ghul.
But the NYT instead claims that Jim Comey approved of torture legally, even while downplaying his concerns about the "combined techniques" memo that was the focus of his concerns (and not mentioning his response to the third memo).
Marcy then proceeds to do what Scott Shane and David Johnston appear not to have even attempted. She gets the real news from those e-mails, which includes specific instances of Cheney and Addington and Bush exerting extreme pressure on the Justice Department to retroactively immunize torture. Read the whole thing, and her previous posts, and see what real reporting is.
In follow up to Marcy's posts, Glenn adds:
I want to focus on what the Comey emails actually demonstrate about what these DOJ torture memos really are. The primary argument against prosecutions for Bush officials who ordered torture is that DOJ lawyers told the White House that these tactics were legal, and White House officials therefore had the right to rely on those legal opinions. The premise is that White House officials inquired in good faith with the DOJ about what they could and could not do under the law, and only ordered those tactics which the DOJ lawyers told them were legal. As these Comey emails prove, that simply is not what happened.
The DOJ torture-authorizing memos are perfectly analogous to the CIA's pre-war intelligence reports about Iraq's WMDs. Bush officials justify their pre-war statements about WMDs by pointing to the CIA's reports -- as though those reports just magically appeared on their desks from the CIA -- when, as is well documented, Dick Cheney and friends were continuously pressuring and cajoling the CIA to give them those threat reports in order to supply bureaucratic justification for the attack on Iraq. That is exactly how the DOJ torture-authorizing memos came to be: Dick Cheney, David Addington and George Bush himself continuously exerted extreme pressure on DOJ lawyers to produce memos authorizing them to do what they wanted to do -- not because they were interested in knowing in good faith what the law did and did not allow, but because they wanted DOJ memos as cover -- legal immunity -- for the torture they had already ordered and were continuing to order. Though one won't find this in the NYT article, that is, far and away, the most important revelation from the Comey emails.
But you don't have to just take it from Marcy and Glenn. Read Comey's e-mails. Read this:
It leaves me feeling sad for the Department and the AG.
...
I just hope that when this all comes out, this institution doesn't take the hit, but rather the hit is taken by those individuals who occupied positions at OLC and OAG and were too weak to stand up for the principles that undergird the rest of this great institution.
...
People may think it strange to hear me say I miss John Ashcroft, but as intimidated as he could be by the WH, when it came to crunch-time, he stood up, even from an intensive care hospital bed. That backbone is gone.
Whoever leaked this story to the Times might, as Marcy thinks, have been doing so to pre-empt the OPR report coming out some time this summer, to blunt it by saying that all of the lawyers involved were on board and that the program was indeed legal. Dan Froomkin, who has an excellent analysis at WaPo (proving again the traditional media can get it right) also sees that as possible.
The message their [Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury] defenders clearly wanted to send -- and which the Times conveyed -- was that even those DOJ officials who had thus far "escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law" agreed with at least some of the rationales put forth by Yoo et. al.
If that was the leaker's intent, well, then they got the story they wanted out of the New York Times. But that's not the story that these e-mails tell, and they do far more damage up the chain of command--pointing the finger directly at Bush and Cheney--than they do to Comey.