JustRalph
07-07-2008, 02:58 PM
The NY Times outs a CIA interrogator and the left ignores it. Where are the cat calls for "Frog Marches" and "Prison time" ????? Where????
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/logoprinter.gif
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06pubed.html?_r=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
July 6, 2008
The Public Editor
Weighing the Risk
By CLARK HOYT
TWO weeks ago, over the objections of his lawyer and the Central Intelligence Agency, The Times named the interrogator who used shrewd psychology, not rough stuff, to get Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to talk.
The interrogator and his family fear that the newspaper has endangered their lives, and many readers asked why The Times could not have withheld his name. Suzanne Dupre of Evanston, Ill., said she was shocked by The Times’s decision. Deuce Martinez “was loyally serving his country in a dangerous job,” she wrote. “The Times has made him a marked man.”
Scott Shane, the reporter, and his editors said that using the name was necessary for credibility. Martinez was, after all, the central character in the story. They said that nobody provided evidence that Martinez would be in any greater danger than the scores of others who have been identified in the news media for their roles in the war against Al Qaeda. Those include other former C.I.A. officers, the warden at Guantánamo, military prosecutors, the lawyer who wrote Justice Department memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques, and even a New York Port Authority policeman who helped arrest a terrorist.
The Times gave a brief explanation of its reasoning in an online Editors’ Note, but it did not tell readers that, because Martinez was so worried, it was not using his first name, only his nickname, or that it had alerted him to a Web site where he had posted a great deal of personal information, which was taken down before the article was published.
The episode involved the clash of two cultures, journalism and government intelligence, with almost diametrically opposed views about openness. It raised the difficult question of how to weigh the public’s right to know about one of the most controversial aspects of the war on terror, the interrogation of prisoners, against the potential harm in naming an honorable public servant.
Shane said he started reporting in March on the interrogation of Mohammed and quickly focused on Martinez, a desk-bound analyst, not a covert spy, who was pressed into service and wound up establishing a remarkable rapport with the ruthless terrorist. Although Mohammed had been subjected earlier to waterboarding, which simulates drowning and is condemned as torture by many, Martinez took no part in that and refused to be trained how.
Shane said he had sought the C.I.A.’s cooperation in reporting the story but was rebuffed by the agency and by Martinez, who now works for a private contractor. After Shane contacted friends and associates of Martinez and sought an interview with him, Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A.’s director of public affairs, sent a strongly worded letter to Dean Baquet, The Times’s Washington bureau chief. Naming the interrogator “would be reckless and irresponsible,” Mansfield said, and “could endanger the lives of this American and his family” by making them Qaeda targets. And in the “poisoned atmosphere” of the debate over the C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques, Mansfield wrote, Martinez could be “vulnerable to any misguided person who believes they need to confront ‘torture’ directly.”
Baquet asked for a meeting to discuss the C.I.A.’s request. Mansfield refused. He told me the letter said it all and nothing could be accomplished by a meeting. But to Baquet, Shane and Rebecca Corbett, the editor of the story, the refusal suggested that the C.I.A. was not actually that concerned. The Times has been asked before by the C.I.A. to withhold information — it has sometimes agreed, sometimes refused — and serious requests have usually come from the top of the agency, with an opportunity to discuss them.
~more at the link~
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/logoprinter.gif
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06pubed.html?_r=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
July 6, 2008
The Public Editor
Weighing the Risk
By CLARK HOYT
TWO weeks ago, over the objections of his lawyer and the Central Intelligence Agency, The Times named the interrogator who used shrewd psychology, not rough stuff, to get Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to talk.
The interrogator and his family fear that the newspaper has endangered their lives, and many readers asked why The Times could not have withheld his name. Suzanne Dupre of Evanston, Ill., said she was shocked by The Times’s decision. Deuce Martinez “was loyally serving his country in a dangerous job,” she wrote. “The Times has made him a marked man.”
Scott Shane, the reporter, and his editors said that using the name was necessary for credibility. Martinez was, after all, the central character in the story. They said that nobody provided evidence that Martinez would be in any greater danger than the scores of others who have been identified in the news media for their roles in the war against Al Qaeda. Those include other former C.I.A. officers, the warden at Guantánamo, military prosecutors, the lawyer who wrote Justice Department memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques, and even a New York Port Authority policeman who helped arrest a terrorist.
The Times gave a brief explanation of its reasoning in an online Editors’ Note, but it did not tell readers that, because Martinez was so worried, it was not using his first name, only his nickname, or that it had alerted him to a Web site where he had posted a great deal of personal information, which was taken down before the article was published.
The episode involved the clash of two cultures, journalism and government intelligence, with almost diametrically opposed views about openness. It raised the difficult question of how to weigh the public’s right to know about one of the most controversial aspects of the war on terror, the interrogation of prisoners, against the potential harm in naming an honorable public servant.
Shane said he started reporting in March on the interrogation of Mohammed and quickly focused on Martinez, a desk-bound analyst, not a covert spy, who was pressed into service and wound up establishing a remarkable rapport with the ruthless terrorist. Although Mohammed had been subjected earlier to waterboarding, which simulates drowning and is condemned as torture by many, Martinez took no part in that and refused to be trained how.
Shane said he had sought the C.I.A.’s cooperation in reporting the story but was rebuffed by the agency and by Martinez, who now works for a private contractor. After Shane contacted friends and associates of Martinez and sought an interview with him, Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A.’s director of public affairs, sent a strongly worded letter to Dean Baquet, The Times’s Washington bureau chief. Naming the interrogator “would be reckless and irresponsible,” Mansfield said, and “could endanger the lives of this American and his family” by making them Qaeda targets. And in the “poisoned atmosphere” of the debate over the C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques, Mansfield wrote, Martinez could be “vulnerable to any misguided person who believes they need to confront ‘torture’ directly.”
Baquet asked for a meeting to discuss the C.I.A.’s request. Mansfield refused. He told me the letter said it all and nothing could be accomplished by a meeting. But to Baquet, Shane and Rebecca Corbett, the editor of the story, the refusal suggested that the C.I.A. was not actually that concerned. The Times has been asked before by the C.I.A. to withhold information — it has sometimes agreed, sometimes refused — and serious requests have usually come from the top of the agency, with an opportunity to discuss them.
~more at the link~