Elisabeth Bumiller, the reporter, said she was just trying to convey what the study said, not swallowing a Pentagon line, and that she had plenty of problems with the study that she tried to make clear to readers. Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief, said Bumiller questioned whether the study was newsworthy, but he overrode her doubts.

Image Clark Hoyt Credit... Chuck Kennedy/McClatchy-Tribune

Douglas Jehl, who directs national security coverage and edited the story, said he became aware that there was a distinction between suspected cases and confirmed cases only after the article was published. “Had I known, I would have treated the story differently,” he said. The report, since released, said someone could be listed as being suspected of militant activity based on “unverified or single-source, but plausible, reporting,” a standard The Times would not accept for its own reporting.

Jehl said he would have used only confirmed cases in the lead paragraph. Although he and Baquet defended the article as still worth the front page, I think the difference between one in 20 and one in seven made it a much less compelling story that should have run inside, with stronger warnings that The Times had its doubts. (On Friday, the paper published an editor’s note saying the article should not have accepted the premise that all the prisoners were engaged in terrorism before their capture, and should have used the one-in-20 figure.)

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, told me that, in retrospect, “I wouldn’t lead the paper with it exactly in the form it appeared, and I definitely would give it a different headline.”

Abramson, Baquet, Jehl and Bumiller said the Pentagon report was being suppressed, and that made The Times hungry to find out why. Bumiller, expressing frustration that people think the report was just handed to her by someone with political motives, said she worked for weeks to obtain a copy. She said she found an official who believed the report should be released, and “I pestered this official for it for a long time.” The official finally agreed to let her make notes from a copy but would not give it to her.

With limited time, Bumiller said she focused on the hardest evidence, the 29 former prisoners named as having suspected or confirmed involvement in terrorism or militant activity. She was looking for verifiable facts. Confirmed versus suspected was not a big issue to her, Bumiller said, and “it was a mistake not to focus on that.” She thought the bigger problem was that 45 more people were accused of terrorism but not identified.

Abramson said, “The whole game of leaks can be problematical if you aren’t given a document or the time to look at it in a full way.”