(continued)

Winners: The always provocative Naomi Wolf speculates on the Huffington Post about what might be in those missing CIA torture tapes, while Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report in Periscope that when then–national intelligence director John Negroponte met with then–CIA director Porter Goss, Negroponte strongly advised against destroying the tapes, while Harper's believes the president himself viewed the tapes before they were destroyed. Wolf quotes extensively from a hugely important new book, Administration of Torture, written by ...

Winners: Senior ACLU litigators Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. Published last October, the book draws on more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information suits and includes dozens of important findings:

* Autopsy reports record numerous deaths in U.S. custody as homicides caused by strangulation, suffocation, or blunt-force injuries.

* Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve more aggressive interrogation methods for use at Guantanamo, says he received "marching orders" from President Bush.

* Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani, a Guantanamo prisoner who was stripped naked, paraded in front of female interrogators, made to wear women's underwear on his head, led around on a leash, and forced to perform dog tricks. Although Rumsfeld did not himself authorize those specific methods, he failed to end them.

* FBI personnel who complained of abuse at Guantanamo were complaining of abuse that had been authorized by the Defense Department chain of command.

* The plan of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib was endorsed by senior Defense Department officials.

* Though the president and other senior officials insisted that abuse was limited to Abu Ghraib, a Defense Department "Information Paper" shows that, three weeks before the Abu Ghraib photos were leaked to the press, the army was aware of at least 62 allegations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of which did not relate to Abu Ghraib.

Published two months ago, the book provides the most comprehensive account ever of all of the ghastly effects of the torture carried out by the "we do not torture" Bush Administration.

Sinners: Every single major national media outlet. So far, no important newspaper or network has reviewed this book or written a substantial news story about its findings. Sole honorable exception: Leonard Lopate, who interviewed the authors on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Winner: Lally Weymouth, for a wonderfully tough and funny interview with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf on newsweek.com. Two gems:

NEWSWEEK: Is there a difference now that you have shed your uniform and relinquished your post of army chief of staff?
MUSHARRAF: On a personal note, I loved my uniform. From the national point of view, I don't think there is a difference.
NEWSWEEK: Why are you now clamping down on the media? You seem far more angry now than ever before.
MUSHARRAF: I think you are right. [Laughs.] Why don't you understand? Am I a madman? Have I suddenly changed? Am I a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

Baseball's steroid scandal pushed almost everything else off the front page for a few days. ESPN.com paid homage to Sports Illustrated with its needle-in-a-baseball graphic.

Miss: Make up your mind: The night George Mitchell released his report, ESPN's SportsCenter devoted its entire 12-minute opening segment to the story (with considerable follow-ups after that), but in the second segment, ESPN legal analyst David Cornwell dismissed the whole thing as a "strikeout" from a legal point of view.

Hit: The Los Angeles Times noticed that the only time a Dodger player seemed to be in jeopardy because of steroid use was when the team thought he had stopped using them.

Hit: Naturally, the Wall Street Journal went straight to the bottom line: "Despite the immediate damage to the reputation of Major League Baseball, marketers say they aren't likely to be scared off the sport in general."

Hit: Amy Shipley in the Washington Post was genuinely sophisticated about why the report probably won't end baseball's addiction to drugs, while ...

Hit: Thomas Boswell managed the best combination of sorrow and outrage, also in the Washington Post.

(Special thanks to FCP sports editor Alex Goldberger.)

And in Other News:

Hit: A decades-old literary battle continues to rage in the New Yorker this week. In an unusual, non-bylined piece, Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, presses on with her dubious claim that Carver's stories were better before they were severely reworked by Gordon Lish, a well-known editorial genius. To his credit, Lish has nothing to say about any of this meshugas. Judge for yourself by reading this line-by-line comparison of an edited and an unedited Carver story.

(Special thanks to FCP fiction editor RW.)

Hit: The Wall Street Journal uncovered a U.S. exemption that allowed a Chinese food company to bypass inspection—after that company had been cited by a Canadian food safety agency for importing shrimp tainted with cancer-causing antibiotics. The FDA apparently hadn't heard of the Canadian citation before a WSJ reporter called and asked for comment.

Miss: Oops ... the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the Des Moines Register was about to endorse Obama. The next day Hillary Clinton got the Register's blessing, along with John McCain. The Boston Globe agreed with the Register about McCain, but endorsed Democrat Barack Obama in the New Hampshire party. FCP predicts: The Globe's sister paper, the New York Times, will follow the Globe's lead on McCain and Obama, though Hillary still might snag its endorsement.

In his full hour on Meet the Press, Mitt Romney took back just about all of the moderate comments he made about religion to Jon Meacham last week, while Tim Russert did a decent job of proving Romney's never met a position that didn't deserve his support—on both sides.

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	2	4	10
White Women	0	1	1
Black Men	0	1	2
Black Women	0	1	3
Gay People	0	0	1

Research assistance: Thomas Rogers, Richard Vanderford
Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.


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