USA: NYT's Pentagon Propaganda - Misleading report=?ISO-8859-1?Q?_on_Guant=E1namo_and?= terrorism

NYT's Pentagon Propaganda: Misleading report on Guantánamo and terrorism
<http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3788>
5/27/09

 While former Vice President Dick Cheney has been front and center in the
media debate over the current White House's national security policies, he's
not the only one trying to challenge the White House's message. The New York
Times published a front-page article (5/21/09) that bolstered the notion that
former Guantánamo prisoners "return" to terrorist activity.

The remarkably credulous Times story, under the headline "1 in 7 Freed
Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds," was based on a Pentagon report leaked
to the paper before its release yesterday evening. The article emphasized the
notion that former prisoners "returned to terrorism or militant
activity"--without adequately explaining the definition of either term, or
examining whether those former detainees were ever "terrorists" in the first
place.
And as Talking Points Memo has noted (5/26/09), the Times' front-page
headline claiming that "1 in 7" detainees had returned to the fight glossed
over the DOD's own distinction between "confirmed" and "suspected" cases.

And missing from Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller's account was a full
explanation of the Pentagon's long history of releasing similar studies, which
have been widely challenged and debunked. Attorney H. Candace Gorman, who
represents some Guantánamo detainees, has challenged the Pentagon's findings
(Huffington Post, 3/13/07), as has journalist and terrorism analyst Peter
Bergen (CNN, 1/24/09). As one prominent critic, Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall,
explained (Washington Independent, 1/23/09):

Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been
forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people
who have never even set foot in Guantánamo--much less were they released from
there. They have counted people as "returning to the fight" for their having
written an op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in
a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and
retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their
numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning--except as an
effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed
dangers of these men.

The Times quoted Denbeaux deep in its May 21 piece, but those comments failed
to convey the serious problems with the Pentagon's previous reports on Guantánamo.

More fundamentally, can the Times be sure that the Pentagon knows that the
detainees were ever "terrorists" to begin with? As Denbeaux explained in one
report (12/10/07 [PDF]), "Implicit in the Government's claim that detainees
have 'returned to the battlefield' is the notion that those detainees had been
on a battlefield prior to their detention in Guantánamo." He concluded, based
on reviewing the Pentagon's own Combatant Status Review Tribunal records, that
just 4 percent of the available summaries "alleged that a detainee had ever
been on any battlefield." Only one detainee was actually captured by U.S.
forces on a battlefield. And, of course, fighting U.S. forces on a battlefield
is not in itself an act of "terrorism."

Even Bumiller seemed to distance herself from some of the language in her
piece. Appearing on MSNBC (5/21/09), she noted that "there is some debate
about whether you should say 'returned' because some of them were perhaps not
engaged in terrorism, as we know--some of them are being held there on vague
charges." The Times went on to make significant changes to the report on its
website (TPM Muckraker, 5/21/09). The new headline is "Later Terror Link Cited
for 1 in 7 Freed Detainees," and the piece reported that the former detainees
"are engaged in terrorism or militant activity"--as opposed to "returned to
terrorism or militant activity."

Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet (Politico, 5/21/09) responded by
arguing that the changes were not all that significant:

The story was about the estimate of the number of people who ended up, by
DOD's account, as being engaged in terrorism or militant activity after
leaving Gitmo. That still stands. The change was an acknowledgment that some
assert that not everyone in Gitmo is truly a terrorist. Some critics have said
that Gitmo is also filled with people who aren't truly terrorists.

This is disingenuous, at the very least. The story was about people
"returning" to the "fight," based on the latest in a series of misleading and
contradictory Pentagon reports on the topic--which should have led the Times
to treat the leak with more skepticism in the first place. The paper noted in
the article that the report's "conclusion could strengthen the arguments of
critics who have warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees
as part of President Obama's plan to shut down the prison by January." That is
precisely the effect it had (conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough gave the
paper a "tip of the hat"--5/21/09), thanks entirely to the way the Times
mishandled the story.

ACTION:

Ask New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt to examine the way the Times
handled its May 21 story about the Pentagon's claims regarding Guantánamo
detainees. Did the paper's original report do enough to challenge the
Pentagon's claims? And do the paper's subsequent changes to the story warrant
some explanation to readers?

CONTACT:

Clark Hoyt
Public Editor, New York Times
212-556-7652
public@nytimes.com