Hullabaloo

Saturday, June 06, 2009

 

Wrong Again

by digby

The torture apologists are out in force trying to confuse and obuscate and the paper of record is helping them do it. Marcy's on it:

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).

But there is more news than that in the Comey emails--news the Grey Lady doesn't seem to think is news.

I can't tell you how often I heard over the past week that the crisis in journalism is going to destroy democracy as we know it. How can we live without the great investigative reporting of the papers of record, something with which I agree? But never once did I hear any of those who defend mainstream journalism actually admit the fact that its stuff like this that is killing them as much as anything. The story is factually wrong, which can be proved by their own previous reporting.

Read Marcy's series of posts on this. it's going to take a lot of work to unravel this nonsense. It's journalistic malpractice. Again.

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digby 6/06/2009 04:30:00 PM |