Winners and Sinners
Winners & Sinners / Martin Luther King Jr. Day edition.
Winner: Scott Horton. This morning Harper’s Magazine jumped its publication date for the March issue by thirty days to rush out Scott Horton’s blockbuster cover story about three possible murders at Guantanamo which the government and the mainstream media have always described as suicides.
The piece also identified a black site on Guantanamo where those who died may have been tortured on the night of their supposed suicide.
Horton is a law professor, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and one of the finest torture reporters of our time.
At the heart of the cover-up Horton alleges is the fact that the Pentagon told the press--and convinced most reporters--that the three prisoners who died had hanged themselves. However, Horton has interviewed five American servicemen who gave this account of what Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, told a meeting of fifty guards at 7am the morning after the prisoners had died.
The commander said to the guards, “you all know” that the prisoners committed suicide by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. “But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes."
Horton says Bumgarner refused all of his requests for interviews, although Bumgarner did attack the story today to the Associated Press after it was posted on the Harper’s website.
The guards interviewed by Horton said the night of the prisoners’ deaths, the guards believed that they had witnessed the prisoners' removal to the black site away from the prison compound. They also said that their clear site lines from the guard towers made it possible for them to know that none of the prisoners had been taken from their cells to the medical center on the night of their deaths.
In a article entitled "The Battle for Guantánamo" in The New York Times Magazine in 2006, Tim Golden wrote about Col. Bumgarner’s efforts to humanize conditions at Guantanamo. He also reported the “suicides” of these three prisoners as an established fact.
Golden never interviewed any of the guards quoted in Horton’s story. Yesterday, he told FCP that he had read Horton’s story “quickly,” but he refused to make any comment about it.
Some of the guards interviewed by Horton ridiculed Golden’s piece as “stenography” for Col. Bumgarner.
Horton’s story also accuses the Obama administration of allowing the Justice Department to conduct an investigation of these deaths which was nothing more than a continuation of the cover-up that started under George Bush.
He writes that the chief investigator in the case, Teresa McHenry, “has firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least one of those memos” which authorized the torture conducted at Guantanamo and elsewhere. McHenry refused to discuss her role in the preparation of that memo with Horton.
Tune in to Keith Olbermann's Countdown tonight on MSNBC, where Horton is expected to produce new evidence casting doubt on Col. Bumgarner’s credibility.
Sinners: David Carr and Tim Arango, who wrote a worshipful, 1,943 word profile
of fox News Chief Roger Ailes for the front page of The New York Times--which included exactly one paragraph of balance:
“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” said Matthew Freud, who is married to Ms. Murdoch and whom PR Week magazine says is the most influential public relations executive in London.”
The other 1,878 words were favorable--because Fox is supposedly the most profitable division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. And why would anyone bother to mention that those profits come from constantly stirring up the dumbest 1 percent of the American TV audience with lies, hatred, and the never-ending tears of Glenn Beck? The sad truth is, readers of The New York Times almost never learn the truth about Fox or Beck or the rest of the serial prevaricators on that network. For that information, you have to be a regular viewer of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.
Sinner: Lloyd Grove, for his appalling review of a new biography of Molly Ivins in The New York Times Book Review--one of the worst FCP has ever read. Who was the genius editor who decided that a failed gossip columnist like Grove would be the best person to evaluate the life of one of the most important progressive journalists of the 20th century? According to Grove, “Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life isn’t convincing as the biography of a significant figure in journalism”, mostly because “Ivins never wrote the big, important book about Texas that she’d always wanted to.”
The fact that she was one of the great newspaper columnists of her era, who was right about Iraq, George Bush and oh-so-much else when the geniuses in the Washington press corps were getting it all wrong, well, Grove (an alumnus of that fabulous group) doesn’t mention that. To understand who Ivins really was, read Paul Krugman’s great column about her or FCP’s own tribute. Or CJR's excellent review of the book here.
Winner: The indispensable Hendrik Hertzberg, for his laugh-out-loud review in this week’s New Yorker of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's new book--the first account of the 2008 campaign to be “told in the style of an airport potboiler.” Says Hertzberg:
Game Change is a bit like those tabloid photo features in which celebrities are caught with their cellulite showing. What do we learn from it, apart from the news that the thighs of the famous may be lumpier than they look onscreen? One lesson is that the eagerness of political operatives to trash tends to be inversely proportional to the power, present and future, of the trashee.
Winner: Tony Judt, for one of the most important pieces of 2009: What is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy, published last month in The New York Review of Books. His 6,600 word article is a devastating account of the sharp decline of the Western World over the last three decades--and essential reading for anyone disturbed by the perilous condition of American democracy. For this, it was also the winner of the Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award for December.
-30-
Charles Kaiser
is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of The New York Times, and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.
Sydney Schanberg
Sydney Schanberg won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Cambodia "at great risk" during the Indochina War. He is a former op-ed columnist for The New York Times and Newsday and a former metropolitan editor of The Times.
Comments
Ivins' great Limbaugh takedown
Reading Krugman's tribute made me want to read her essay on "Lyin' Bully" Rush Limbaugh, and sure enough, it's available online: http://motherjones.com/politics/1995/05/lyin-bully Her comments in 1995 hold up well today.
Grove the sinner
Mr. Kaiser I don't know you, and I met Molly Ivins only once. But thank you, genuinely, for pointing out the minor atrocity the NYT Book Review committed by allowing a writer of comparatively little accomplishment toss off, as a firm conclusion, the absurd notion that Molly Ivins wasn't a significant enough journalist to serve as the subject for a book. It's nice to see sheer fatheadedness underlined in public every now and again, and in this case, I can't determine whether the more obese cranium belongs to Mr. Grove or the editor(s) who engaged him and "edited" his work. John Mecklin
Let me wear my conflicts
Let me wear my conflicts plainly. I worked with Lloyd in The Washington Post Style section, where he was a terrific political writer before he became a gossip columnist, and I was hired by Robert Kaiser, who was a fine journalist. So a twofer. And I like reading this columnist and his tart likes and dislikes, so a trifecta. I have not read the book on Molly, but I read Lloyd's review and it never occurred to me that it anything other than an affectionate review. He opens by talking about what great fun she'd have today -- implying, rightly, that she has no true successor in the establishment press -- and then notes that she was a self-created woman. And? From Hemingway to Fitzgerald and so on and on, self-creation is woven into the American DNA (Twain included!). The book sounds fascinating in that regard, and Lloyd properly draws attention to her contradictions. That is hardly to call her a fraud--which in fact Lloyd did not. She was not Twain (who most certainly wrote several big books), nor was she widely syndicated enough to be widely known--however unjust that is. Honestly, Charles, in this case I think you're swinging at bats ... Michael
ivins and grove
Molly Ivins was much more popular among liberal journalists than the public. As time went on, she became more and more of a one-note horn, tiresomely repetitive as she villified all things Republican.
Lloyd Grove's Complaint
Lloyd Grove forwarded the following complaint to FCP, via Facebook [typos corrected]:
Hey Charles, I'm not sure how I can be both a failed gossip columnist and part of the Washington journalistic establishment (which as you know includes someone you share DNA with) that promoted the Iraq war. I will give you $5 American--wish it could be more, but I am an inkstained wretch--if you can show where I ever supported going to war with Iraq. Not that it matters, since I am a failed gossip columnist, but I didn't think it was such a hot idea. Also, your selective and dishonest characterization of my Times review would seem to qualify you for a sinner designation yourself. I have no idea what private agendas are operating here, but perhaps you should disclose them.
FCP replies: Lloyd–You have accused me of a “selective and dishonest characterization” of your review of the new biography of Molly Ivins. I plead guilty to the former, innocent to the latter.
The impression I took away from your piece was that you considered Ms. Ivins to be both a fraud-- “it was mostly a pose”–and a failure–“a painfully intimate portrait of her family dysfunction, struggles with alcoholism, thwarted love life and professional frustrations.”
Now it is certainly true that Molly came from a fancy background, and that she sometimes pretended to have been a Texan earlier than she actually was. However, what made her important was her capacity to reject the values she was raised with so that she could embrace a whole new set of admirable convictions. You call that a pose; I call that progress.
Having framed her fraudulent dysfunction, you go on to demean her by making fun of the authors’ assertion that she was both “one of the best-known and most influential journalists in American history” and “a Texas Mark Twain.”
Whether or not she was one of the best known or most influential journalists in American history is certainly debatable, but whether or not she was one of the most powerful, prescient and accurate columnists of her time is not, in my humble opinion. As I have written elsewhere, “She excelled at the most important test for every pundit: she was right more often about the vital issues of our time than almost any other columnist.”
Finally you dismiss her two best-selling books about Bush as “two slight volumes”–although they are actually both fascinating and devastating portraits of the worst president of modern times. Then you finish her off because she never wrote a big book about Texas, as if that were some kind of venal sin, merely because it was her unfulfilled ambition to write one.
Why you find it contradictory to be described as both a failed gossip columnist and a member of the Washington press corps is not immediately clear to me, since I believe the most prominent part of your gossip writing career took place as an employee of the Washington Post. If you feel that my phrasing implied that you were one of those who had advocated the war in Iraq, that was not my intention, and I apologize for my clumsiness.
As far as my DNA is concerned, I am proud to admit that I have a brother who happens to be an extremely talented Washington reporter, but I have never considered that a reason to withhold criticism of his less-perspicacious colleagues. I also don’t believe that Bob Kaiser ever promoted the war in Iraq, if that’s what you are implying.
You ask about my “private agenda.” It is true that I loved and admired Molly for many years, and that I said nice things about her in the book that you reviewed. In the item I wrote about you, I linked to a piece I had written about her, to make sure there was nothing hidden about that longstanding admiration.
I have never hesitated to be a fierce defender of my friends, and I hope I never will. If I do have a “private agenda,” it probably goes something like this:
Ivins once wrote, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” Molly was a vital part of that struggle just about every moment she was alive. You, on the other hand, have mostly made your living by immersing yourself in the minutiae of the lives of people, who, by and large, are unfit to clean her shoes. I guess that’s why your pathetic attempt to demean her reminded me so much of a flea, clinging to the leg of a lioness.
Molly Ivins book
I read the book, and I happen to agree with Grove that the authors oversold Ivins's significance. But that's not why I write. I recall your name, Mr. Kaiser, appearing at least a few times in the narrative as a close friend of Molly's. Seems to me you might have disclosed that in your rant against Grove.