Torture and omission

CURRENT EVENTS

Sometimes omission is as fascinating as inclusion. This has been especially true in following coverage of the torture memos' release.

• Stories have frequently neglected to mention that details about most of the techniques in the memos were already revealed in International Committee of the Red Cross documents leaked to Mark Danner and published by the New York Review of Books. This is vital! If a reader doesn't know this, they'll think there was no public record before.
  
• Rarely is it noted the government faced an ACLU court deadline to release the documents. Yes, Obama's campaign promises suggest he would have released them eventually. But the timing relies on this. And I have yet to read any analysis of whether the administration could have stalled or denied the court's request.
  
• When outlining claims that the memos' release will allow potential terrorists to prepare for interrogations and thus harm intelligence gathering, articles faithfully note the tactics have been banned. However, there is seldom mention that the U.S. Army Field Manual--which includes interrogation limits--is posted online. While I hope we never use these tactics again, I think rhetorically it is worth asking: If the Army can get away with telegraphing their moves, what's the problem if the CIA does so?
• Almost never are the Geneva Conventions guidelines on torture mentioned. Given prosecution is an underlying theme of all stories, this would seem to be a must-have.
  

I have found the coverage of the torture memos both inspiring and infuriating. Omission is not the only frustration. One story will lay to rest a claim or myth with a sharp bit of evidence, then the next day the claim will resurface. Often this will happen within the same newspaper. Perhaps it is the rush, the deadlines. These issues, of course, seem more navigable at leisure. But it is still disappointing.

# # #

One evening in Guatemala nearly a year ago, my sister and I caught a ride in the back of a pickup. The truck bed quickly filled with people, yet in the warm darkness our fellow passengers were no more than indistinct outlines. City lights turned the strangers into faces. One man, I noted in curiousity, held a long glinting cylinder. As we disembarked, I realized it was a pump-shotgun.

My fellow passenger was one, as Anne-Marie O'Connor writes in today's Washington Post, of the nearly 100,000 "poorly educated, badly paid -- but well armed" private security guards in Guatemala. "As in the rest of Central America, they outnumber the police and army," she writes. It is a classic foreign feature--opens and closes with an anecdote; quotes experts (including one from the UN), shopkeepers and the Guatemalan president, and drops a wage comparison (to the "hotel across the street)--but wonderful nonetheless. O'Connor, who is, fascinatingly, both a "veteran Latin American correspondent" and a former Los Angeles Times entertainment writer, wins feature of the day.

# # #

Quote of the day:

"They don't come in to consult," Pelosi said of administration officials. "They come in to notify. They come in to notify. And you can't -- you can't change what they're doing unless you can act as a committee or as a class. You can't change what they're doing."

--A defensive Nancy Pelosi in the last graf of a Washington Post story on the awkward, toe-trodding dance between Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration since the torture memos were released