Slate's media critic Jack Shafer is inconsistent, but I can't recall seeing him get something this wrong before -- at least not something this significant. Ten days after Harper's posted Scott Horton's troubling account of the many holes in the Guantanamo "suicides" story (which I posted about here), Shafer took notice and, for reasons I can't comprehend, went on the attack against Horton. Anyone who's read the article -- and certainly anyone who's familiar with what we already know about how the U.S. has treated detainees in the "War on Terror" -- should be able to recognize what a bizarre misreading Shafer is applying here:

But if you were going to torture prisoners to the point of death in interrogations, would you really draw three prisoners from the same cell block, inside the same hour, for that punishment? It would make more sense to torture one to death, cover up that murder, and after a decent interval proceed with the gained information to torture the second prisoner to death. Or, if your aim was to execute them and cover up the murders, why bring the bodies back to a medical clinic where scores of people would examine them and an investigation would be started. Killing three prisoners on one night and then attempting to cover it up is a mission that not even the combined powers of Jack Bauer, James Bond, and Jack Ryan could pull off.

How did Shafer come away with the impression that -- in Horton's version -- the military set out to kill these three men and then call it suicide? That's the sort of distortion I expect from someone who has political reasons for wanting to dismiss ugly realities. It's not what I expect from a professional critic of journalism. And that assumption on his part, plus the rest of the details in this "critique," suggests to me that Shafer just didn't have the equipment to evaluate Horton's article. I can't figure out why he was so sure he did.Harper's editor Luke Mitchell was surprised, too, and he responded to Shafer online, patiently cataloguing the many shortcomings of his critique. He points out the absurdity of the paragraph I quoted above:

First, you envision a nutty scenarioif you were going to torture prisoners to the point of death in interrogations, would you really draw three prisoners from the same cell block, inside the same hour, for that punishmentand then you knock it down by noting how nutty it is. Perhaps it is nutty. But that scenario is your own invention.

Horton does not insist that we now know what happened to these men. He points out that the official story has many holes -- something already established by the Seton Hall study he cites -- and uncovers testimony that raises more doubts. Shafer calls this "blithely ignoring facts and statements collected by the government." But believe me, there's nothing "blithe" about Horton's careful unpacking of the inconsistencies in this case. And even if you dismiss the testimony of all of Horton's sources, you still have to reckon with the troubling facts. The "best-case scenario" is not a pretty picture. Conor Friedersdorf laid it out:

Know that one of the Gitmo Three was arrested at age 17, held for some years without being charged, and scheduled for release at the time of his death due to the militarys conclusion that no evidence linked him to al Qaeda or the Taliban. We may never know exactly how he and his fellow detainees died: A conclusive, independent autopsy is impossible because their bodies were returned to their families with their throats missing.

And again here:

...in the best case, we arrested an innocent teenager and held him in Cuba absent any evidence of wrongdoing so long that he decided to kill himself. That alone is an injustice that ought to trouble anyone who believes that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the God given rights of all humans, and were an American teenager held by a foreign government with a similar dearth of evidence I am sure you can imagine how insistent everyone would be about the injustice, even if he didnt wind up dead.

I'd be a happier person now if I could convince myself that Horton's article was all nonsense and there's nothing to see here. But even the undisputed facts of the case are too ugly to ignore, and for a media critic to use his platform to pat the mainstream outlets on the back for continuing to ignore those ugly facts is astonishing. Shafer makes reference to "Occam's razor," but it seems to me he ought to think a little harder about what that phrase means -- or else stick to criticizing fatuous "trend stories" in the Sunday Styles section of the Times. On the other hand, I see the New York Times "Idea of the Day" blog has now seen fit to recommend Horton's article to readers -- along with Shafer's critique. So maybe Shafer's skeptical take is actually a clever feint, because he knew from experience that outlets like the Times wouldn't call attention to Horton's piece unless they could "balance" it out with some sort of rebuttal, however flimsy. If that was the plan all along, then well played, sir. But I kind of doubt it.

Mollie Wilson O’​Reilly is editor-at-large and columnist at Commonweal.

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