Raymond Bonner, a former foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the New York Times, is author of Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong. This article was published in partnership with ProPublica.

If the sales of Judith Miller’s memoir are commensurate with the vituperation of the attacks on her, the royalties will mount. Her critics—they are many and loud—say the former New York Times reporter bears a responsibility for the Iraq war because the articles she wrote in the lead-up to the invasion advanced the Bush Administration’s contention that the country had weapons of mass destruction.

It’s easy to disparage Miller. Too easy. Censure her and we can sidestep looking at our own reporting, at broader disquieting questions about journalism since 9/11. As journalists, we all let our guard down in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on American soil. We abandoned some of the most important journalistic principles—speak truth to power; hold governments accountable; display healthy skepticism—at the base of the American flagpole. And I don’t just mean the royal we, the institutional we. I, too, am culpable.


A few weeks after 9/11, Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian-born pilot, was arrested at his home near London’s Heathrow airport. He was alleged to have trained several of the 9/11 pilots during the time he had been a flight instructor in Arizona, from 1997 to 2000. The incriminating evidence included the fact that several pages of his flight log were missing during the period of time he was alleged to have trained one of hijackers. I was among the journalistic mob that staked out his house and interviewed his neighbors, and I wrote several articles about his arrest and the efforts by the Bush Administration to extradite him, relying on evidence gathered by the FBI. I wince as I read them now. The articles appeared under the rubric “A National Challenged,” and their clear import of was that the FBI had a strong case linking him to the 9/11 attacks. A British court subsequently found that Raissi had been falsely accused—the pages were "missing" due to the negligence of law enforcement officials—and ordered that he be paid compensation.

The Raissi story is illustrative of how the media reported the “war on terror,” emphasizing national security over civil liberties. Editors behaved like politicians—they worried about putting the resources in places to cover the next terrorist attack, while paying scant attention to lives ruined by the erosion of civil liberties. When law enforcement officials, whether in Washington or New York, said they were worried that terrorists might use helicopters or crop dusters, it was a front-page story. The horror stories of individuals falsely accused of being a terrorist were buried inside the paper, if reported at all.

With the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering, Attorney General John Ashcroft told a congressional committee that a mosque in Brooklyn was funneling money to al Qaeda. It was the lead story in the New York Times. It turned out to be wrong, as the reporter, Eric Lichtblau, would later note, with remarkable candor and admirable journalistic integrity. Lichtblau understood why: “We in the media were no doubt swept up in that same national mood of fear and outrage,” he wrote in Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice.

Not long ago, the New York Times announced that henceforth it would call torture “torture.” Until then what the CIA was doing to get information from terrorist suspects—stuffing them in coffins; hanging them by their hands, naked; smashing them against walls; siccing snarling dogs on them—was called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a euphemism artfully drafted by Bush Administration lawyers.

The paper’s editors gave various tortuous reasons as to why they wouldn’t use the word “torture.” It would be taking sides in a political debate was one; another was that there had not been a legal determination that these techniques were torture. Well, calling slavery slavery also took sides in a political debate, and we write that a person has allegedly committed murder before there has been a court determination.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, released in December, exposed in gruesome, soul-wrenching detail the brutal methods CIA interrogators deployed on terrorist suspects, one response of the agency and its backers was that you had to look at the tenor and mood of the times—there was tremendous fear of another catastrophic terrorist attack, and any official who had not done everything possible to avert it would pay dearly. That probably comes close to the truth as to why the Times avoided the word “torture”—the mood and tenor of the times (and at The Times) where fear and patriotism were prevailing emotions, acknowledged or not.

The Times wasn’t alone, of course. Prior to 9/11, the four largest American newspapers called waterboarding torture, according to a study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. Then, in 2004, in the aftermath of revelations that the Bush Administration was waterboarding terrorist suspects, these same four newspapers—the New York Times; Los Angeles Times; USA Today and Wall Street Journal—almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. And even when the media did began to talk about “torture,” it focused on waterboarding, but waterboarding was almost benign compared to some of the other tortures inflicted on suspects.

Another journalistic sin, the one I was guilty of, was giving too much credence to allegations by government officials that a person was a terrorist. Journalists routinely described Abu Zubaydah, who was seized in a raid in Pakistan and brutally tortured as a secret site in Thailand, as a senior Osama bin Laden lieutenant, which is what officials said. In fact, he wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda, the CIA ultimately determined, a fact we didn’t know until the Senate report on torture was released.

One of the first individuals to be subjected to extraordinary rendition was Muhammad Saad Iqbal. A Pakistani, he was picked up in Jakarta in December 2001, shackled, blindfolded and drugged and taken on a CIA flight to Egypt, where he was tortured, before eventually ending up in Guantanamo. The Washington Post, and The Australian—one of Australia’s most influential newspapers—ran lengthy front-page stories about Iqbal’s life in Indonesia, his capture and rendition to Egypt, giving credence to the allegations by anonymous intelligence officials that he had terrorist links and intentions. He was completely innocent, without any "links" of any nature to Al Qaeda; indeed, after being held by Americans for seven years, he was released without a single charge being filed against him. I cannot find a word about his release in the Post or The Australian, and the New York Times buried an interview with him after his release deep inside the paper.

These days, stories about men released from Guantanamo and go back to the battlefield are news, often big news. What do we know about the men who were released and returned to lead—or try to lead—normal lives?

A few weeks ago, when Columbia Journalism school delivered its report on Rolling Stone’s article “A Rape on Campus,” the journalism school’s dean, Steve Coll, said there were enough lessons to be drawn from the mistakes that went into reporting the article to teach a journalism course.

Surely, there is a course to be taught about the media’s response to 9/11, how, as Eric Lichblau put it we got swept up in the patriotism, and what that did to reporting. Call it “Journalism Post 9/11.” The questions are many, troubling and knotty. How do you balance concerns about national security with protection of civil liberties? As the Senate report on torture makes clear, very little valuable intelligence came from the torture of suspected terrorists, but the harm to America’s moral standing in the world has been immense. If reporters had been more aggressive in reporting on secret prisons and torture, might they have been halted sooner, thus protecting America’s image, as well as many innocent lives—if we journalists still care about that. The course doesn’t start with Judith Miller, and it doesn’t end with Judith Miller.