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Glaberson pens another Gitmo pattern piece

By Mark Obbie

William Glaberson continues his impressive beat coverage of Guantanamo detainees, this time in a front-pager that's a synthesis of the many snapshots that he and other members of the press have taken in recent weeks. The bigger picture that emerges from Glaberson's notebooks shows how extensively the remaining ranks of detainees are riddled with cases that don't hold up to scrutiny, now that courts and military commissions are reviewing the cases. Glaberson points out that this is so even though previous releases of hundreds of detainees had supposedly whittled the imprisoned contingent down to "the worst of the worst." It's yet another example of the Times' admirable commitment to a systematic monitoring of U.S. detention policies, based on reported facts. That commitment is epitomized by this database tracking all known detainees past and present, which I commented on here. The Times hasn't been alone in its efforts to document the detainees' cases. McClatchy Newspapers, for example, worked hard at reporting comprehensively on the detainees who were released (though I was critical of its particulars here). But no news organization comes close to matching the Times for its consistent and thorough approach to the topic -- a commitment made despite layers of official secrecy, and serving as the antidote to all the punditry and posturing that substitutes for analysis elsewhere.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 19, 2009 (boomark / email).