Why We Must Not Let Newspapers and Magazines Fail

The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times (Sunday, May 15th) carries an absolutely blood-freezing contribution by Mark Danner. Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, managed to get his hands on a report prepared by the Red Cross after a unit of the humane organization visited Guantánamo late in 2006 to review the prison's interrogation procedures. Its report was given in strictest secrecy to the CIA.

"A short time ago," Danner writes, "this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity." Tales From Torture’s Dark World is a condensed version of that NYRB article adapted for the Times.

That the barbaric methods used to interrogate the prisoners, authorized at the highest levels of the US government, border on atrocity will be self-evident to anyone who who has a heart (Dick Cheney excepted). But what I wondered as I read it is whether the Red Cross's report would ever have come to light without the investigative spirit and courage of Danner and the publications that sponsored him. Though abstracts of his report will appear on countless blogs, would any of them have been willing to invest their own resources to initiate the kind of probe he undertook? It's one thing for bloggers to tread the path blazed by pioneers, but would any of them have the guts to break the story and risk prosecution or harassment?

I don't think so.

I won't try to match the eloquence of those who have appealed for humanitarian treatment of combatants and political prisoners. Nor can I judge the guilt or innocence prisoners from whom confessions were extracted by the cruelest forms of coercion. "From everything we know," Danner writes, "many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be 'brought to justice,' as President Bush vowed they would be."

No, the reason I'm writing this is to remind you that truth and openness, the pillars on which western civilization rest, depend on newspapers and magazines as well as book publishers such as those publishing these revelations. We also depend on writers like Danner to interpret those revelations and place them in a moral context such as this one:

"The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured - and have already done so at Guantánamo - means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which 'torture doesn’t work.' The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed."

This website has carried many items about the efforts of print publishers to arrest their sickening financial freefall. Some of these ideas are viable and some are not. The issues underlying the rescue of publishers caught up in a devastating paradigm shift are complex and challenging. But we have to find a solution.

Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must - find a way to preserve it.

Richard Curtis