Gray Lady Down (36 page)

The paper’s effort to color the services as misogynistic came in the form of reports alleging widespread sexual harassment and abuse, especially in theater. One of these was a March 2007 Sunday magazine cover story about post-traumatic stress among women who had served in Iraq, but it backfired. At the time, more than 160,000 female soldiers had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the article explained, a huge increase compared with Vietnam and even the Gulf War of 1991. “One of every 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq is female,” the article said, and claimed that female veterans returning from Iraq have much higher levels of post-traumatic stress than males, some of it from greater susceptibility to combat exposure, but some a result of sexual trauma. “A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking health care through the V.A. said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service,” the article said. “Of that group, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times, and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped.”

A theme of the piece was the indifference of a “male-dominated military culture” to women’s concerns. One of the main subjects was Amorita Randall, a Navy construction worker or “Seabee” who said she had been raped once while stateside, and again in Guam while awaiting deployment to Iraq in 2004. “You just don’t expect anything to be done about it anyway, so why even try?” Randall said. Compounding her trauma, Randall said her Humvee in Iraq was hit by an IED, killing the soldier who was driving and leaving her with a brain injury.

Three days after the article had gone to press, the Navy called the
Times
to say that Amorita Randall had never been in Iraq. Only part of her unit was sent there; Randall served with another part of it in Guam. The Navy claimed that
Times
fact-checkers had not given it the time to verify Randall’s account. But even by deadline, there was information available “to seriously question whether she’d been in Iraq.” Within a week, the
Times
issued another embarrassing correction: “Based on the information that came to light after the article was printed, it is now clear that Ms. Randall did not serve in Iraq, but may have become convinced she did.”

While it seized on any evidence of malfeasance on the part of U.S. servicemen and women, the
Times
also disparaged or ignored instances of heroism. For example, when the former NFL football star Pat Tillman died after his unit of Army Rangers in Afghanistan came under friendly fire, it was a tragedy, and the Army commanders who tried to obscure the details in order to create a heroic narrative were deeply wrong. But could the whole, sad tale be reduced, as one
Times
editorial said, to a “bogus” story of heroism “used to bolster support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”? Was it so awful that his memorial service was “patriotism-drenched,” as Frank Rich put it? And just when did “friendly fire” become synonymous with “fratricide,” a much darker word that the
Times
used liberally in almost all of its Tillman stories?

While the
Times
was quick to cover such unfortunate incidents and do scores of stories involving abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, TimesWatch noted that by the end of October 2007, the paper had reported on only two of the twenty men who had been awarded the Air Force Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor. Nevertheless, the
Times
complained about a dearth of Medals of Honor awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a May 2010 Sunday magazine story titled “What Happened to Valor?” It went into bitter detail describing how the Pentagon had denied the nation’s highest military decoration to Marine Sergeant Rafael Peralta, who had
come from Mexico with his family as a teenager. It did bestow the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor, which his mother refused to accept.

Thus it was all the more egregious when the
Times
did not acknowledge the military heroism of Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a Navy Seal from Patchogue, Long Island. Ambushed in Afghanistan in June 2005, Murphy crawled into the open to radio for help, further exposing himself to enemy fire. He was killed, but his self-sacrifice led to the rescue of one of his men. Murphy became the first Medal of Honor winner in the Afghan conflict. (The story is retold vividly in Marcus Luttrell’s
Lone Survivor.
) The
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times
ran reports on Murphy’s posthumous Medal of Honor commendation in October 2007, as did the
Daily News,
the
New York Post
and
Newsday.
But the
Times
ran nothing, even though the story had an obvious “local hero” rationale. An editorial in the
New York Post
noted that on the same day the
Times
failed to report on Murphy, “No fewer than three stories reported on how Americans had killed innocent Iraqi civilians.”

The
Times’
alienation from military culture comes across in more subtle ways as well. In November 2005, a profile marking the two-thousandth military death in Iraq featured Marine Corporal Jeffrey Starr of Washington State, who was killed in Ramadi on his third tour of duty. As James Dao reported, “Sifting through Corporal Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine’s girlfriend. ‘I kind of predicted this,’ Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. ‘A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.’” This short passage from Starr’s letter was presented in a way to make him seem like a prescient and pessimistic victim of an overextended military. But Dao left out an important part of the letter, showing how Starr wanted his death to be perceived in the event he didn’t return:

In an interview, James Dao defended his handling of the extract from Starr’s letter, claiming he had captured its essence. In response, the
New York Post
wrote, “There is saintliness in a soldier’s prospective acceptance of an honorable death in combat. To diminish such a deed, especially in service of a political agenda, approaches sacrilege.”

The war in Iraq is winding down, our combat troops now withdrawn. What will happen in Afghanistan is still not clear. What is certain, though, is that “the war over the war” will remain a contentious aspect of our national politics. It is playing out in the most polarized way through continuing debates over what some call “torture,” others call “detainee abuse,” and still others see as the necessary evils of a fight against a barbaric enemy from an alien moral universe. In large measure, the fight over “torture” has also been a way to fight about how the United States will defend itself when the threat is from individual actors more than massed troops. The
Times’
opposition to the War on Terror and to the Iraq conflict lives on through this unending argument about the “tortures” inflicted on terror suspects and the alleged corruption to the national soul resulting from the use of dehumanizing methods of detention and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, as well as the CIA’s various “black sites.”

The first round in the torture debate centered on Abu Ghraib. The abuses there were serious, representing a corrosion of military discipline and a propaganda coup for America’s enemies, who saw pictures of Iraqi detainees on leashes, with women’s underwear on their heads, stacked naked on top of each other, or standing on a box while “wired” to simulate imminent electrocution. Frank Rich characterized Abu Ghraib as the equivalent of My Lai—even though Seymour Hersh, who broke both stories, said it didn’t come close. The main problem with the
Times’
coverage
was overkill, making Abu Ghraib a metaphor for the whole of a complex enterprise. After the photographs were discovered and Hersh’s exposé was published in the
New Yorker,
at least fifty-three reports on Abu Ghraib appeared on the front page of the
Times.
Some press critics saw it as an orgy rather than news coverage. As Daniel Henninger of the
Wall Street Journal
wrote, Abu Ghraib was “a real story that got blown into a month-long bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq.”

The most extreme moment in the
Times’
coverage and commentary on Abu Ghraib was a long Sunday magazine essay by Susan Sontag, which seemed to fulfill Bernard Goldberg’s insight that “To the anti-war crowd, what happened at Abu Ghraib was not a tragedy but more an opportunity—one more chance to reveal America as depraved and dishonorable.” Sontag wrote, “The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts, but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely. Considered in this light, the photographs [of the abused prisoners] are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration’s distinctive policies.” Sontag went on to charge that “The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle” promoted by the Bush administration. Lynching photographs from the American South were “souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done,” Sontag declared. “So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.”

In its eagerness to ladle out bad ink about Abu Ghraib, the
Times
fell for a hoax. On March 11, 2006, in a long front-page article accompanied by several pictures, Hassan M. Fattah reported from Baghdad on the human rights activism of one Ali Shalal Qaissi. Under the headline “Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare,” Fattah wrote that Qaissi had been the prisoner at Abu Ghraib who was photographed in a hood, standing on a box, with wires dangling from his body. Fattah called this picture
“the indelible symbol of torture at Abu Ghraib.” He reported that Qaissi was now an activist who had joined a lawsuit against U.S. military contractors, was lobbying on behalf of those still in custody, and was barnstorming the major Arab capitals to publicize U.S. mistreatment of Iraqis with the infamous photo on his business card.

Within days,
Salon
magazine posted a challenge to the report’s veracity, based on more than 250 images of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse it had obtained and related documents. Qaissi was not the man in the hood,
Salon
claimed. On March 23, the
Times
published an editor’s note confessing to having been suckered, and admitting that a more thorough examination of previous articles in the
Times
and other newspapers would have shown that military investigators in 2004 had named another man as the one on the box.

Round two of the torture debate was the crusade to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. According to the
Times
editorial page, most of the detainees there were “hapless foot soldiers,” either caught up in the chaos in Afghanistan or sold out by unscrupulous countrymen who wanted to settle a score. The
Times
claimed that the enhanced interrogations of the detainees yielded no real information of any exigent value that saved lives or illuminated al-Qaeda’s plans. In one report, Lizette Alvarez quoted Amnesty International saying that Guantanamo represented “the gulag of our time.” (Trying to define the gulag, she said it was a Stalinist system that killed “thousands,” when in fact it killed millions.)

In early 2009, the
Times
also dismissed the Guantanamo recidivism rate—the number of released detainees who returned to terrorism—as “little more than public relations for the Guantanamo Center.” A few months later, in May, the Pentagon leaked a classified report, ironically to the
Times’
Elisabeth Bumiller, estimating that one in seven of the 534 prisoners already released from Gitmo “are engaged in terrorism or militant activity.” The story led to an editor’s note, a critical public editor’s column, and a kind of corrective op-ed. The basic line was that not all the suspected recidivists had been involved in jihad to begin with, and
not all were confirmed to have returned to jihad. According to the public editor, Clark Hoyt, “Had only confirmed cases been considered, one in seven would have changed to one in 20.”