New York Times‘ Dean Baquet: We can call it “torture” now that it’s clear no one will be punished for it.
It’s not often that a media outlet’s decision to “recalibrate its language” attracts much attention. But when it’s the New York Times, and the shift is about what to call torture in the Newspaper of Record, such changes matter.
In August 2014, 10 years after the initial revelations that made US torture an international news story, Times executive editor Dean Baquet wrote a short piece for the Times website (8/7/14) stating that the word “torture” would be used to describe “incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.”
In other words, the newspaper is now accepting the reality that the term can be accurately applied to some actions of the United States. Ten years ago, when it was revealed that the CIA was torturing “War on Terror” prisoners, critics—including FAIR—were asking the Times to call US torture by its name (FAIR Action Alert, 5/14/04). The paper had, officially or not, carved out an exception for the US government, whereby torture would be described euphemistically as “enhanced” or “harsh” interrogations.
So this shift, if it is to be considered at all significant, comes a decade too late. But that’s the just the start. Baquet’s reasoning is revealing. He writes that the Times resisted the label for so long because “the situation was murky,” and that the “Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of ‘torture.’” Surely most countries that practice torture would resist prosecuting themselves, so it’s hardly a reasonable standard for a media outlet.
Perhaps most illuminating, though, was Baquet’s admission that the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute US torturers motivated the paper’s shift. The government
has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program. The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked.
So the Times will call torture by its name now that no one is likely to be prosecuted, and because the debate eventually became “focused” on its practical benefits. Thus, allegations of torture that are walled off from legal accountability are safe—assuming the paper even covers them at all.
The first test of the New York Times’ new policy came with the release of an August 11 Amnesty International report on torture in Afghanistan. It’s a test the Times failed.
The report covered 10 discrete episodes of torture and brutality that killed dozens of Afghan civilians. But the most explosive stories concern the actions of a US Special Operations unit that was linked to torture, killings and disappearances between November 2012 and February 2013. The evidence gathered by Amnesty strongly suggests that US personnel were intimately involved. In one especially harrowing account, an Afghan man named Naimatullah talks about a raid on his family’s home by US Special Forces:
Naimatullah said that the Americans brought two of his brothers, Esmatullah and Siddiqullah, into two separate rooms, and started beating them. They also beat Hekmatullah in the yard. “I could hear them beating the others,” Naimatullah said, “and when I saw them they were in terrible shape.”
Hekmattullah told Amnesty International that the Special Forces operatives “dragged me from my room by the back of my collar, and then threw me down the stairs. While I fell my shoulder and buttocks were fractured. Even now I have problem walking: it is painful and I can’t stand straight.”
According to Amnesty’s report, US forces then took Naimatullah’s three brothers away. Only Hekmattullah was ever seen again.
Amnesty reports that several of the families that were able to recover the remains of the missing reported that the bodies showed signs of torture, from what appeared to be acid burns on clothing to gruesome injuries.
The report received attention from other outlets like the LA Times and Washington Post, but was not featured in the New York Times. A FAIR Action Alert (8/18/14) noted the disconnect between the Times’ new torture policy and its silence on the Amnesty report. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan (8/19/14) seemed to agree with FAIR’s take, writing that Amnesty “pulled together a great deal of information—especially about the role of the American military—in a comprehensive and forceful way that would have benefited Times readers.”
But others at the Times didn’t see why they should have bothered. Foreign editor Joseph Kahn told Sullivan that Amnesty’s findings “appeared to be recycled” and “did not add much to what we have already, on many occasions, reported.”
It’s true that the Times has reported on the allegations of torture in Afghanistan. But there’s one clear lesson one can draw from that reporting: As the evidence of US culpability grew, the paper got less interested.
On February 25, 2013, the New York Times reported that the Afghan government had “barred elite American forces from operating in a strategic province adjoining Kabul on Sunday, citing complaints that Afghans working for American Special Operations forces had tortured and killed villagers in the area.”
The Times emphasized the damage this could do to the US mission: The move “would effectively exclude the American military’s main source of offensive firepower from the area.”
A month later, the Times (3/21/13) reported that the Afghan government was compromising on its exclusion of US troops, “breaking an increasingly acrimonious impasse.” The paper reminded readers that the source of the dispute was “complaints related to abuses by American forces and accompanying Afghan men during night raids in the province, accusations the coalition has denied.” The paper added that certain “Afghan and Western officials” blamed the deaths and torture on local insurgents.
Almost two months later (5/13/13) came the headline “Afghans Say an American Tortured Civilians.” But this was not about American military personnel; the American in question was identified as Zakaria Kandahari, an Afghan-American who was working as an interpreter for the Special Forces unit. The Times included a comment from a US official—“speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with official policy”—who insisted the US had no role: “We have done three investigations down there, and all absolve ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] forces and Special Forces of all wrongdoing.”
Some might find such denials unpersuasive; as the Times reported (5/13/13), Afghan officials had a video of at least one torture session, and the remains of the victims were turning up just outside the US base.
The Times (5/22/13) reminded readers days later that “there has been no testimony directly tying American soldiers to the abuse or killing of those detainees.” The paper added that “the American military has described Mr. Kandahari as a freelance interpreter who had volunteered to help the American Special Forces, who allowed him to live at their base in exchange.”
Weeks later, the Times (6/5/13) was reporting the discovery of more bodies just outside the US base—and that Afghan and US governments were “in sharp disagreement about who is responsible.”
The story made the paper once again on July 8, with the news that Kandahari had been arrested. The paper’s account again reiterated US claims that it had nothing to do with the torture, but Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch offered a dissenting view:
The US said they investigated thoroughly, there’s nothing there, so everyone should go away and accept their word that they checked and did nothing wrong? I don’t think that ends the discussion. There’s a lot more explaining that needs to be done that hasn’t happened yet.’
That explaining would have to happen elsewhere, though. The New York Times ran just one more story that mentioned the controversy, a July 23 dispatch that once again stated that US officials “have cleared their troops of responsibility in any torture or killing.”
The paper added that government officials “have refused to offer further explanation of what might have happened to the dead men.” One would think the arrest of the principal suspect might inspire new reporting.
And it did—just not in the New York Times. A major investigation by Rolling Stone’s Matthieu Aikins (11/6/13) raised serious doubts about the US denials about Kandahari and the unit. “Many of the men who disappeared in Nerkh were rounded up by the Americans in broad daylight, in front of dozens of witnesses,” Aikins reported. He added that over five months,
Rolling Stone has interviewed more than two dozen eyewitnesses and victims’ families who’ve provided consistent and detailed allegations of the involvement of American forces in the disappearance of the 10 men, and has talked to Afghan and Western officials who were familiar with confidential Afghan-government, UN and Red Cross investigations that found the allegations credible.
Aikins even tracked down Kandahari for a prison interview; unsurprisingly, he denied responsibility for the killings. The US argument that a rogue interpreter carried out an extensive campaign of torture is not only far-fetched; Aikins wrote that it is
in a certain sense, irrelevant. Under the well-established legal principle of command responsibility, military officials who knowingly allow their subordinates to commit war crimes are themselves criminally responsible.
To Aikins, these stories “would amount to some of the gravest war crimes perpetrated by American forces since 2001.” But they remained obscure to readers of the New York Times, even after the Amnesty report corroborated his charges.
But the Times didn’t entirely ignore Rolling Stones’ reporting; on February 16, 2014, the Times mentioned that Aikins’ exposé had received a George Polk Award.
