In the wake of the Obama administration's release of Bush-era torture memos, a curious thing happened. The mainstream media missed some truly damning information that was readily available in the memos.
Former Valley resident Marcy Wheeler—a.k.a. the blogger Emptywheel at the popular FireDogLake blog—thinks she knows how that kind of omission can happen. "A lot of newspaper journalists have a source fetish," Wheeler said in a recent interview. "This torture story is a perfect example. They read through it quickly, and then they just called their sources."
Wheeler took a different approach, one that she says is more typical of bloggers, who often do their work outside of newsroom culture. "I wrote about 12 posts analyzing precisely what the memos said. I have human sources, I just use them differently and less." Wheeler's close reading of the documents produced two incredible numbers: Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Somehow that devastating testament to waterboarding's inefficacy had gone unnoticed. "I'm going to find stuff like that," says Wheeler. "It's what I do well. And then I'll call people."
The mainstream press often looks down on mere bloggers, but it's mighty hard to argue against hard-hitting results like that, especially when they reveal the need for a major outbreak of chagrin among establishment reporters. In this case, when the New York Times reported the numbers, they gave Wheeler credit for the discovery. That kind of acknowledgement of bloggers is uncommon at best. (And Wheeler has been first to a big piece of investigatory news before: "I was the first person who, in the Scooter Libby case, revealed that he had testified that Bush and Cheney ordered him to leak.")
Wheeler is the author of Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy, a book about the revealing of Valerie Plame's CIA status, and her blog can be found at emptywheel.firedoglake.com.
