14 Years After 9/11, The Press Is Finally Becoming More Aggressive In Its Coverage of Secrets and the War on Terrorism

Margaret Sullivan

May 21, 2015

Secrets, the C.I.A. and The New York Times

Since 9/11, the United States’ “war on terror” has become the overarching news story of our time.

As the nation’s dominant news organization, The Times deserves, and gets, intensive scrutiny for how it has handled that story. The grades, clearly, are mixed. Its role in the run-up to the Iraq War has been rightly and harshly criticized. Its early reporting on surveillance, though delayed, was groundbreaking. Its national-security reporting has been excellent in many ways and, at times, is justifiably slammed for allowing too much cover for government officials who want to get their message out.

Nearly 14 years after 9/11, a reckoning finally is taking place. The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, has said repeatedly in recent months that he thinks it’s time to toughen up and raise the bar.

Here’s what he told me recently, in the context of a column I wrote about covering drone strikes and the death of civilians:

“We’ve learned the perils of not monitoring and policing warfare” as rigorously as possible, and of too readily agreeing to government requests to withhold information.

“We were too soft years ago — at least, I’ll say that I was.”

As part of this change of heart, Mr. Baquet recently gave approval to publish the names of three undercover Central Intelligence Agency officials, including that of the architect of its controversial drone program. He said it was important to do so for the sake of providing public accountability. Timing was key: The decision came just after President Obama took responsibility for the deaths of two Western captives in an American drone strike in Pakistan.

Current and former government officials pushed back hard. Robert Litt, the general counsel to the director of national intelligence, said publicly that The Times had “disgraced itself” by publishing the names, and had put those officers’ and their families’ lives at risk.

And 20 former C.I.A. officials signed a letter to The Times criticizing the decision. They rejected Mr. Baquet’s accountability argument:

Officials who work on covert operations do not escape accountability. Their actions are carefully reviewed by the C.I.A.’s general counsel, the inspector general, White House officials, congressional overseers and Justice Department attorneys. Indeed, some of the operations referred to by The Times have been discussed publicly by the president and are some of the most carefully overseen in our government.

Here’s a long interview with Mr. Baquet done by Jack Goldsmith, who now has written several times on this subject. Mr. Goldsmith served in various roles in the George W. Bush administration, and essentially approaches the topic from the right. The interview is well worth the time of anyone interested in the details of how Mr. Baquet reached his decision and how he justifies it.

Mr. Goldsmith, in a later post to his Lawfare blog, said he found the C.I.A. officials’ arguments against The Times unpersuasive. He concluded:

No one denies that there are good reasons for covertness and secrecy in many cases. And in many such cases, the mainstream media honors those norms (such as by not naming agents who are undercover overseas). But in an era characterized by frequent leaks, seemingly self-serving rolling back of cover, and serial exaggeration of the risks of transparency, abstract arguments for covertness and secrecy are simply not enough when the CIA loses its secret to the press and the press has a plausible argument for publication in a particular, exceptional case. The officials’ reaction to the Times story traded on authority and expertise and implicitly offered a “trust us” rationale rather than making concrete arguments about actual harm. The days in which such general arguments about harm can be effective are gone, and indeed such arguments are now often self-defeating.

I asked Mark Mazzetti, a national security reporter for The Times and the co-author of the article that named the officials, for his view now, a few weeks after the fact.

“We think it was the right thing to do and the right time to do it,” he told me. “The C.I.A. has increasingly become a paramilitary organization,” and the identity of those who are, in effect, its generals is something the public deserves to know, he said. “We don’t plan to use names gratuitously, and without a serious reason.”

He also made the point that Mr. Obama’s speech — almost exactly two years ago — at the National Defense University, promised a narrowing of America’s secret wars, higher standards for drone strikes and more transparency.

“We should hold officials to that, to judge them by their own standard,” he said.

It’s a fact of life that news organizations do their soul-searching in real time, often on deadline. They don’t always make the right decisions. The stakes are high, and scrutiny intense — as with this piece by Peter Maass of The Intercept, who (taking a whack at The Times along the way) puts new coverage in the light of a gripping PBS “Frontline” special that aired this week.

But it’s certainly a healthy sign that The Times’s top editor and some of its key reporters are not only grappling with these issues, but are willing to do so publicly.

In an era in which “trust us” — on the part of both the government and the media — hasn’t worked out too well, this discussion couldn’t be more important for American democracy and for We the People.