Good side-by-side reading

CURRENT EVENTS

Thursday was a good day for some compare and contrast reading. What happened? President Obama released the Justice Department memos detailing the CIA interrogation methods used against terrorism suspects and said that he wouldn't pursue charges against CIA officials. But the different accounts of his thin slicing on the second point made for interesting reading. The Los Angeles Times, judging from other accounts, gets it plain wrong, or at least misleads:

At the same time, Obama assured CIA employees and other U.S. counter-terrorism [my emphasis] officials that they would be protected from prosecution for their roles in running a network of secret prisons set up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

No one else suggests he included anyone beyond rank-and-file agents--not that they hit all the key points either. The Wall Street Journal, which was the only one of the four to open the story with the immunity declaration, goes to pains to explain who will be protected, but leaves it to the ACLU's executive director to note who wasn't:

While Mr. Obama promised not to prosecute CIA officials, Mr. Romero said the president should consider whether the authors of the memos and Bush administration officials who approved the techniques should face criminal charges.

One better is the New York Times, which enunciates what was and wasn't said, but the best writeup--at least of this aspect of the announcement's significance--was by the The Washington Post, who convey both who is left out and the administration's :

Authorities said they will not prosecute CIA officers who used harsh interrogation techniques with the department's legal blessing. But in a carefully worded statement, they left open the possibility that operatives and higher-level administration officials could face jeopardy if they ventured beyond the boundaries drawn by the Bush lawyers.

On a separate note, every paper but the LAT trumpets the CIA's plans to use an insect against a detainee within the first three grafs, while only the LAT and the WSJ mention the tactic was never used. Classic case of jumping on a catchy detail, despite it being minor and unrepresentative. Not to say that the tactics weren't brutal, or even constituted torture, but why shout about something that never happened when so much wrong did?