The New York Times vs. Common Decency

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an exciting story about how the CIA broke 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammed. The hero of the story was a nondescript CIA interrogator who astonished his CIA colleagues by eliciting enormous amounts of valuable information from KSM, all by using psychological ploys and developing a rapport with the terrorist rather than the tactics used by the "knuckledraggers" as the interrogator's colleagues called the CIA paramilitary types, who were using waterboarding and other methods of torture.

As Allah from Hot Air points out, the story in the Times was not about the interrogator but rather the U.S. government's stumbling about in the post 9/11 intelligence climate searching for a counter terrorism strategy. Why then, did the Times reporter Scott Shane, his Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet, and executive editor Bill Keller decide to include the real last name of the interrogator when publishing the story?

An editor's note published with the article explaining the decision to out the interrogator is self serving twaddle: ...

... How much danger? Here is what the former agent told Hoyt about what happened when his name became known:

When I asked Kiriakou for full details about his experience, he said he received more than a dozen death threats, many of them crank. His house was put under police guard and he took his family to Mexico for two weeks after the C.I.A. advised him to get out of town for a while. He said he lost his job with a major accounting firm because executives expressed fear that Al Qaeda could attack its offices to get him, though Kiriakou considered that fear unreasonable.

Apparently, the Times brain trust did not press Kiriakou for these details because they simply didn't want to hear them. Our brave Public Editor did not see fit to criticize his colleagues for this gross negligence. ...