DOJ Torture Emails: How The Times Could Have Reported The Story

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Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Justice Department lawyers agreed in 2005 that harsh interrogation techniques were legal.

The impact of the story -- which was based largely on email messages written at the time by James Comey, then a high-ranking Justice Department official -- has been, it seems, to bolster the Dick Cheney position in the ongoing torture debate in Washington.

But the Times also, to its credit, released Comey's emails in full, allowing us all to make our own judgments about what they show.

And after a close look at the emails, it seems clear that the paper could have used them to write a very different story -- with a very different effect on the public debate.

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