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The Washington Post has a great A1 article examining yesterday's argument between Obama and McCain on giving detainees the right to seek habeas corpus. The piece got the politics right, usefully contextualizing the advisers involved in the back-and-forth, but also gave a nuanced discussion of the policy dispute, and even attempted to quietly adjudicate the argument and provide readers with a real-world baseline. For instance:
Tuesday, the McCain team drew a direct line between the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying that submitting the bombers to the criminal justice system was, in the words of former Navy secretary and 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, "a material cause" of the 2001 attacks. Lehman participated in the McCain conference call.Lehman said grand jury evidence in the 1993 bombing was "put under seal" and not made available to the CIA, thus denying the agency timely access to information that "would have enabled many of the dots to be connected well before 9/11 and . . . give a good chance to have prevented" the later attack. In particular, he cited information concerning a connection between Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged ringleader of the 2001 attacks who is imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, and the bombing.But both the report of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated intelligence failures leading to the 2001 strikes, and the prosecutor of the 1993 case disagreed with Lehman's version of history. The commission's final report, which Lehman endorsed as a member of the panel, gives no indication that any failure to share information on the bombing with the intelligence community had "significance for the story of 9/11."...Far from being unknown to the intelligence community, Mohammed was indicted in January 1996 in connection with a plot to blow up transpacific airliners. The congressional joint inquiry on the Sept. 11 plot strongly suggested that the intelligence community was well aware of Mohammed's terrorist activities, but that agencies were unduly focused on apprehending him in the airline case rather than on other plots still in the planning stages.The article was written by Anne Kornblut, one of the paper's main political reporters, and Karen DeYoung. I didn't recognize DeYoung's byline, so I looked her up. Sure enough, Karen DeYoung "currently writes about terrorism issues for the National and Foreign Desks. From September 2001 until the summer of 2003, she covered U.S. foreign policy for the paper, writing among other things about the beginning of the counterterrorism struggle and the lead-up to the Iraq war." This would seem like a model papers should use more frequently, pairing political reporters with policy beat reporters. Get the politics right, and discuss the policy with confidence.
