Framing the defenseless for torture

Yesterday, the NYTimes had a long piece laying the design of the torture/detainee program at the feet of two contractor psychologists. My contention was that these two politically disconnected and virtually defenseless targets were being set up to take the fall. Well, today, the NYTimes does it again.

In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists....

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.

I'm not saying that Foggo and the two psychologists aren't complicit or involved or whatever. What I'm saying is that there appears to be a very direct effort towards "leaking" a narrative that puts all the weight on these guys (and the NYTimes is playing along.)

These two psychologists and Foggo are now way outside the Washington system and can gather little support against these attacks. Meanwhile, the institutions which okayed and implemented these policies, and the individuals who ordered them go completely without mention.

I mean, how do you write an article on the orders Foggo received without ever mentioning who gave the orders? How do you write an article on the contractors who designed the CIA interrogation program without mentioning one name of who placed the order or who signed the guys' checks?

I sure hope this series is building towards the higher ups. Otherwise, the NYTimes is simply printing what they're told and are complicit in a frame up designed to exculpate those who are truly responsible, those who ordered and authorized these programs.

Thus far, this series is a journalistic disgrace.