Jeffrey Rosen: Grifter's Delight

In the March 13, 2007 edition of Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Jeffrey Rosen, Georgetown George Washington University law professor and legal correspondent for TNR.  Among other things, she talked to him about his recent article describing the private tour of Guantanamo put on for him (and to be fair, 6 others, including some Bush Administration officials) by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, William Haynes.  For them as may be interested, the Guantanamo discussion begins at about minute 18 of the show.  I've put a very partial transcript below the fold for context.  Here's the bit from Professor Rosen that I found really disheartening:

I really can't overestimate the power of a private flight and [chuckling] a warm omelette sixty thousand feet in the air.  It's very easy to succumb to just the cushiness of being coddled and the excitement of being chosen as part of this small group. And I also have to say I was impressed in my private off-the-record conversations with the General Counsel of the Department of Defense Department, who seemed like an intelligent and well-meaning person, and so it's very easy to get caught up in the giddy sense of seeing something special.

That would be this William Haynes, who assembled and ran the working group responsible for the torture memo, a man who, in doing so, showed nothing but contempt for the rule of law and basic human decency.

So, yeah, Professor Rosen, maybe he seems like an intelligent and well-meaning person.  Even the devil can quote scripture for his purposes. 

You were having pleasant, off-the-record conversations with a man who sanctioned torture as a matter of policy, and describe him later as well-meaning.  I hope you have someone to handle your money for you, because I don't know that you should be trusted with it yourself.  Unfortunately, I suspect that you're probably in the majority of the mainstream reporting on this matter -- if someone seems nice, it doesn't matter what they actually do or believe.

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TG: You've been writing some really interesting articles, and you had an article that was a cover story for The New Republic called "My Vacation in Gitmo" that was basically about a small press junket that you took of Gitmo that was sponsored by who?

JR: This was sponsored by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, William Haynes. And he invited a group of seven law professors, journalists, and Bush administration officials to go to Gitmo and reassure ourselves that it wasn't actually Abu Ghraib.  He hadn't been for a while, nor had some of the Bush officials. The camp has been reorganized under a new commander and I think they feel like they've been getting a lot of bad publicity for a long time and that there's a gap between the lingering images of abuse that we remember from the early days of the now shuttered Camp X-Ray, and the reality of Gitmo, which is that it's now being run as a very professional prison. So, we were summoned with a couple days notice, and what a junket it was.  Imagine showing up at the Pentagon at six in the morning, taking a little van to Andrews Air Force Base, and feeling a little Presidential as you walk across that tarmac up to a private jet - a Gulf Stream jet - which has United States of America emblazoned on it. Soldiers saluting, the sun is rising, and you go into this extraordinarily comfortable plane. The military steward comes around and takes your omelette orders, and all of us were in a very jolly, almost giddy frame of mind for our unexpected little holiday adventure.

[Value neutral / approving discussion of what Rosen saw there, with some notes of skepticism concerning the procedures for trial.]

TG: Is it awkward to go on a press junket like this, knowing that you are being shown only things that the military wants you to see, and you're being treated very well, which is, you know, a good thing? So you are getting a very subjective view of things at Gitmo and you walk away wondering, at least you think you suggested you walked away wondering, "Is any of this staged? How much of this is typical of what goes on there?"

JR: Yes, it was very awkward. I really can't overestimate the power of a private flight and a warm omelette (chuckling) sixty thousand feet in the air.  It's very easy to succumb to just the cushiness of being coddled and the excitement of being chosen as part of this small group. And also have to say I was impressed in my private off-the-record conversations with the General Counsel of the Department of Defense Department, who seemed like an  intelligent and well-meaning person, and so it's very easy to get caught up in the giddy sense of seeing something special. But my response to that was just not to make any judgments at all about whether or not what we were seeing was responsible. [sic] I feel like I've got no way of judging whether it was staged or not, whether we were seeing things selectively or not.  There was nothing two-sided about this tour. My goal in the article was to describe it as neutrally as possible and then to talk more specifically about the problems with the Military Commission Rules that seem to me objectively troubling.

Comments

[Redbeard]

Ah, Rosen knows Haynes is well-meaning.

Rosen's chuckling observation seems almost like a john reminiscing about his escort--"oh, I suppose, intellectually, the odds are that she doesn't like me, but she smiled while she did her thing, and she made me feel good... so I guess she liked me."

Thanks for this post, Paperwight. It's pretty clear that none of these people connected to Washington can resist the red carpet treatment.

You'd think a law professor would have a better mind than this.

[paperwight]

Well, one only has to recall the campaign press corpse in 2000 waxing rhapsodic over Bush's expensive munchies compared to Al Gore's more parsimonious offering, and it becomes clear that the majority of the people charged with reporting and analyzing national news are basically useless when their professional obligations are confronted with a challenge as simple as "food".