NYT Helps the Bushies, Again By Robert Parry

[kpete]

NYT Helps the Bushies, Again

By Robert Parry
May 21, 2009

The New York Times, which helped sell the Iraq War with a bogus story about aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges and withheld evidence of illegal spying on Americans for more than a year, is again mishandling a sensitive story in a way that panders to the Right.

The Times lead story for its Washington Edition on May 21 was headlined, “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds,” and starts out by reporting that a Pentagon study has concluded that “about one in seven of the 534 prisoners” transferred out of the Guantanamo Bay prison “returned to terrorism or militant activity.”

But that is not what the Pentagon can possibly know. Beyond the weaknesses in the Pentagon’s evidence, which is only noted deep inside the Times article, there is the unsupported assertion by the Times that the detainees have “returned” to violent activity, thus assuming that the freed prisoners had previously been engaged in terrorism or other extremism.

Even assuming that the study is correct about one in seven engaging in militant activity after release, the evidence is lacking about the prisoners previous acts of terrorism because – if such evidence existed – the Bush administration presumably would not have released them.

In other words, the most that the Times should have reported is that the Pentagon study claimed that one in seven engaged in militant activities after leaving Guantanamo. It is entirely possible that some ex-prisoners became radicalized and joined with extremists because of their sometimes brutal treatment in U.S. custody at Guantanamo.

more at:
http://consortiumnews.com/2009/052109.html