Prosecuting for Torture: A Little Help from the NYTimes

Hosannas to the New York Times today for giving American policy-makers a huge shove in the direction of a Torture Commission. The Sunday op-ed page devotes a giant piece of real estate to journalist Mark Danner for a recapitulation, with pointed commentary, of the heretofore-secret interviews that Red Cross officials conducted with “high-value detainees” at Guantanamo. The information soberly recounted in these memos leaves no doubt that US government officials committed multiple and grievous acts of torture.

This piece testifies bracingly to the enduring relevance of the American newspaper – and of the New York Times in particular.

We read a lot about the demise of newspapers today – including, poignantly, in the New York Times itself this week. But where else but a newspaper could this information come to light? Let’s examine the options.

Radio couldn’t break this story – there’s no “actuality,” no-one to interview. The Red Cross has strict rules about confidentiality and wouldn’t go on the record for a piece like this (God knows how Danner squeezed the documents out of them); the detainees themselves are inaccessible; and the government officials responsible for the torture are not, I’m guessing, giving interviews.

Ditto TV. No pictures. Television has struggled with this for some time; waterboarding is too creepy, and too staged, to be broadcast. Even Brian Ross of ABC, the TV reporter who has most consistently followed the torture issue (including, not helpfully, to argue that waterboarding works), had trouble illustrating his pieces on the subject.

The internet can help Danner’s piece achieve some prominence, and I hope it does. But how viral is torture? The social media sites are too busy trafficking in cute videos of dogs singing “I love you” (my 13-year-old loved it). If Danner’s piece were originally published in a blog or an online magazine, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. With all due respect to bloggers, nobody out there is pulling in the right audience -- neither in terms of seniority in policy-making, nor in concentratedness, by which I mean that everyone who's anyone on the torture issue will see this piece.

So we’re left with newspapers. And how many of them are there, with any heft or reach? Aside from the NYT, only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have real national exposure. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page would not run such a piece for ideological reasons. I’d like to think Don Graham would use his newspaper to crusade against torture, and certainly the Washington Post editorialized early and well against its use. But the entire Post op-ed page also came out strongly in favor of the war in Iraq and the paper has never really expiated that error, or the general sense that it is wrapped a little too tightly around the decaying corpse of Bush’s “war on terror.”

The NYTimes supported the war in Iraq too, of course, but it also issued a major mea culpa for the real deficiencies in its reporting on the issue. And in recent years, its editorials have been among the strongest calls in the country for accountability for the Bush Adminsitration’s crimes. One senses a real quest to make up for earlier credulity (like burying its first Abu Ghraib story on page A15).

Lord knows, there's still plenty to criticize in the Times' coverage on a variety of subjects. But if you want to see senior Bush Administration officials investigated and prosecuted for torture, then you've got to be thankful, today, that the NYTimes still has clout.