Department of Denial

Thursday, 28th May 2009

Responding to today's Telegraph story which quotes Major-General Antonio Taguba as saying that the unreleased interrogation photos show "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had this to say:

“I want to speak generally about some reports I’ve witnessed over the past few years in the British media. And in some ways, I’m surprised it filtered down,” Gibbs began. “Let’s just say if I wanted to look up – if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champion’s League cup, I might open up a British newspaper. If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not entirely sure it’d be in the first pack of clips I’d pick up.”
“You're not going to find very many of these newspapers and truth within 25 words of each other,” Gibbs continued.

This is, connoisseurs of these things will note, a classic non-denial denial. You attack the publication as a means to discredit the story. See, for instance, John Edwards' suggestion that stories of his adultery had to be nonsense because they appeared in the National Enquirer. Be that as it may, the Enquirer was right. And Gibbs's response - or at least this part of it - today suggests that Taguba and the Telegraph are also correct.

That has no bearing on whether the decision to suppress the photos is correct, of course (and Taguba thinks it was) but nor is it any kind of refutation of the Telegraph's story.

Filed under: Newspapers (360 more articles) , Torture (56 more articles) , White House (23 more articles)