Charles Kaiser on McClatchy's torture coverage

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.
—Major General Anthony Taguba (Ret.)

General Taguba wrote those words in the preface to a newly released report by the Physicians for Human Rights, which finds that 11 inmates of the American gulag who were ultimately released without being charged of any crimes were subjected to beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation, and other cruel practices. Taguba was also the author of an official army study of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." As Sy Hersh reported one year ago in the New Yorker, Taguba was forced to retire because he had told the truth about Abu Grhaib.

You might think that an accusation of war crimes from the highest-ranking American official so far would be front-page news, or at least a big story inside, or, at the very, very least, a brief.

In the McClatchy newspapers, the estimable Warren Strobel did reach that conclusion, and made the general's accusation the lead of an 880-word story. In the Boston Globe, it was the last line in the story about the report. And on washingtonpost.com, the indispensable Dan Froomkin wrote the most comprehensive story of all about the report and the general's accusation.

However, in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post newspaper, the general's accusation was not reported at all.

Washington Post intelligence reporter Joby Warrick told FCP, "The line was originally in the story but was cut during editing ... The decision was partly due to the fact that we had a very small allotted space for the story—10 inches, or about 400 words, in which to summarize the report and give the other side an opportunity to respond—combined with the fact that the Post carried an entire column [Froomkin's piece] devoted to Taguba's 'war crimes' comment that day."

New York Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet did not respond to an e-mail requesting an explanation.

General Taguba's accusation echoes the message of Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, the blockbuster book by Philippe Sands that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Sands is one of a growing number of lawyers who believe that top Bush administration officials will be subject to arrest for international war crimes if they travel abroad—just as General Pinochet was after he was no longer president of Chile.

According to Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union, as of three months ago, more than 160 prisoners have died in U.S. custody during the Bush administration, of which "more than 70 were linked to gross recklessness, abuse, or torture."