NYT isn't neutral; it works for the other side.

I hope you saw my long disquisition about David Johnston’s CIA torture article below. Despite its attempt to spin that information against the Bush Administration, I think it is a net gain for the Republicans in that it substantially debunks the myth that the methods used at the CIA interrogation camps overseas are more brutal than those used at Guantanamo Bay.

But even though this article probably helps my side, I still think it shouldn’t have been published. Here’s President Bush in his Sept. 6th speech on the subject:

Many specifics of this program, including where the detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country.

Here’s David Johnston in the New York Times:

Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002.

Here’s President Bush in his speech:

…so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why. If I did, it would help the terrorist learn how to resist questioning and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

Here’s David Johnston:

At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sometimes, the interrogator would use simpler techniques, entering his cell to ask him to confess. “You know what I want,” the interrogator would say to him, according to one official’s account, departing leaving Mr. Zubaydah to brood over his answer.

Thanks, pal. Now Al-Qaeda knows what we’re likely to do, and Thailand, our ally, is going to have to scramble to explain this. And when it pulls away from us, and when the jihadists redouble their attacks against Thailand and kill innocent civilians, the Times can crow about the failures of Bush’s diplomacy.

Mr. Johnston: I don’t recall seeing your name on my f’ing 2004 presidential ballot, you smarmy self-appointed guardian of the common good. Why don’t you try digging up some dirt about the enemy for a change? I hope you go to jail. Really. I do. I was joking when I wrote this, but I think you and your paper are edging ever closer to it.

And to those sources that leaked this story to Johnston in a (misguided, nay, pathetic) hopes of discrediting the Bush administration: I hope the prison you spend time in is as humane as the treatment Abu Zubaydah received. But I suspect traitors in the general population tend to fare much worse.