Disinformation on waterboarding from The New York Times

In past entries on waterboarding I've demonstrated various ways in which the media, including The New York Times, have provided bad information.

Yesterday's edition provides yet another outstanding example of disinformative journalism from Brian Stelter. I do not see where the story is marked as "news analysis," but plainly it fails to qualify as news reporting in the legendary tradition of the Gray Lady.

It is instructive to note the Times' presentation of this story. Here is how the story links from a different page (online edition):

clipped from topics.nytimes.com

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

By BRIAN STELTER

An official’s claim that waterboarding yielded quick results was widely repeated, but has now been discredited.

The official's claim that waterboarding produced "quick results" has been discredited, supposedly.

Now on to the story and its headline.

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

What type of objective data could ever justify that headline? I have no idea, other than the Times is reporting somebody's opinion about it without crediting that entity in the headline. In this case, the opinion seems to be that of the reporter/news analyst.

On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Keep your eye on the pea. Kiriacou said that waterboarding yielded results "very quickly," and supposedly that is the claim that we will see discredited.

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

Keep your eye on the pea. If Zubaydah gave information within a day of being waterboarded for 30 to 35 seconds, then Kiriacou's claim that waterboarding worked quickly has good support. Whether that one instance of waterboarding continued "(f)rom that day on" is not a measure of how quickly it worked but a measure of the enduring effectiveness of that one session.

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”

If Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, then it contradicts the notion that he was waterboarded once and cooperated happily ever after. But do Kiriacou's claims that waterboarding worked quickly and resulted in actionable intelligence suffer at all? We have no evidence from Stelter to that effect.

But he presses that point nonetheless in his subsequent paragraph:

Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique.

In addition to the pea, let us keep our attention on what has actually been discredited (the notion that one waterboarding session led to enduring cooperation). Supposing that the discredited portions of Kiriacou's testimony did heighten public perception of the effectiveness of waterboarding (this news report has offered us no evidence that is the case except for the opinion of "some" anonymous "critics"). Of note, the remainder of the paragraph gives us a quotation from former Human Rights Watch lawyer John Sifton to the effect that Kiriacou's statements "sanitized" waterboarding.

Is the issue supposed to be the effectiveness or the harshness? Does somebody need to instruct the Times' writers and editors regarding the organization of information into appropriate groups?

After spending a few paragraphs on the historical context of Kiriacou's news appearances, Stelter apparently returns to the issue of discredited information from Kiriacou, but our pea remains out of view:

At the time, Mr. Kiriakou appeared to lend credibility to the prior press reports that quoted anonymous former government employees who had implied that waterboarding was used sparingly.

If only a handful of terrorist suspects were waterboarded, then that is using waterboarding sparingly. Minus quotations from or at least identification of the "prior press reports," we have little reason to trust that Stelter is not putting one over on us. Put nicely, his is not a compelling argument.

Stelter himself seems to lose track of the pea for a couple of paragraphs, one featuring a quotation about the "fiendishness" of the CIA, before providing another relevant tidbit about Kiraicou:

Mr. Kiriakou refused an interview request last week. In a statement to ABC, he said he was aware only of Mr. Zubaydah’s being waterboarded “on one occasion.”

As noted above, the number of times waterboarding was performed is irrelevant to how quickly it works, unless it is alleged that it resulted in no useful information until after it had been used many times and presumably over a longer period of time. Stelter has the pea under the shells, and they're moving briskly over the course of his story.

Oh, and about that "sparingly" thing--Stelter gets back to that in paragraph 17:

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: “This agency did not publicly disclose the frequency with which the waterboard was used, noting only that it was employed with three detainees. If reporters got that wrong, they weren’t misled from here.”

Good point, Gimigliano.

But Stelter is back to discredited claims, albeit he seems to have lost track of which claims were discredited and which have not:

In the days after Mr. Kiriakou’s media blitz, his claims were repeated by an array of other outlets. For instance, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cited the 35 seconds claim to ask a congressman whether the interrogation program was “really so bad.”Months later the claims continued to be amplified; the National Review editor Jonah Goldberg used Mr. Kiriakou’s assertions in a column last year to argue that the waterboarding was “right and certainly defensible.”

Are we supposed to conclude that if Zubaydah was waterboarded on over 80 occasions then it is irrelevant how long each session lasted?

clipped from thehamptons.files.wordpress.com

Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about the covert program for The New York Review of Books, said the news reports had fed the idea that brutal interrogations could instantly glean information about terrorist plans.

And Danner may well be right. But was he talking about mere collection of information that may or may not be reliable information, or was he talking about instant access to reliable information? The latter would very probably represent a poor understanding of the process. The former does not appear to have been brought to serious doubt. Stelter fails his duty as a reporter by leaving the issue unclear.

“There was a completely mistaken impression put about that this technique was not cruel because it could break detainees so quickly,” (Danner) said.

That impression certainly did not come from Kiriacou, who stated plainly that he felt waterboarding was torture. The examples Stelter provides from media reports through this point of the story concern not whether the technique was cruel but whether it was effective and whether or not it should be legal. After all, even the U.S. Constitution bars only "cruel and unusual" punishment. Cruel may be Constitutional and legal.

The rest of the story meanders around various opinions of waterboarding. In effect, Stelter has lost track of his own pea.

That's OK. I was paying attention on his behalf.

The story provides reasonable evidence that some information implied in Kiriacou's testimony was misleading. That is, that one session of waterboarding produced enduring cooperation from the detainee in question.

The "pea," the idea that waterboarding produced quick results and actionable intelligence, was never addressed in the story except obliquely and unconvincingly.

Likewise, the notion that that the Kiriacou interviews "tilted" the debate in some significant way is not established in anything akin to the sense we might expect in a news story. Instead, we get a generalized paraphrase of anonymous sources and the statement from one activist expressing that opinion without any objective data in support.

All in all, an excellent excuse to once again use the tag "journalists reporting badly."