What's also stunning is the glaring disconnect between the professionalism of the TImes editorial page and the utter incompetence of its news editors. It's one thing for reporters to be lazy, ambitious and subservient; it's worse when their editors abandon their responsibility to question, critique and send back for correction, elaboration and repair the junk reporters turn in.

As an editor, I was often very unpopular - and often either had to hold the presses or pop in another less important and timely story - when I refused to print inadequate, misleading or even false stories submitted by reporters who didn't do their jobs. Sometimes it was because they didn't know how to fit facts into context, but too often it was because they weren't curious enough - or were simply too lazy - to pursue obvious holes in their stories.

They also often resented being handed back - often more than once - a story they'd worked hard on marked throughout with questions that undermined their ledes and conclusions. Yet I could look at their documentation, or just use common sense and memory, and point out one problem after another. You'd think a reporter would be grateful that an editor saved him from making an ass of himself, but no...

It's hard to believe that the Times editors, of all of America's top journalists, don't do a better job when the facts are screaming in their faces. Didn't they read those emails? Given the Times's sorry history in publishing the lies that got us into war, they should be especially diligent in making sure to examine closely what the reporters are basing their stories on. If I allowed a story like the one critiqued here to be printed, I'd be ashamed and embarrassed when the gaping holes were pointed out. And I would deserve having my competence questioned.

This incompetence is also goddamned depressing, because these editors are the generals in the public's endless battle for the right to know the truth. With such poor leadership, how can reporters be expected to maintain basic levels of professionalism? How do these editors get and keep their jobs?

Journalism is not rocket science; it's actually very simple. And that makes the Times's repeated failures to do the fundamental work all the more egregious.

The editors of this story are the Times's equivalent of the Bush administration.

The article emphasized strongly the import of such a policy: Giving the prisoners what they want - martyrdom - with absolutely no legal proceedings to justify even their imprisonment, let alone a death penalty. Glaberson gets right to the bottom line: This would be a deal between the government and the prisoners. To paraphrase this cynical horror:

We let you plead guilty and then get to kill you, and you get to be martyrs and also escape more years of torture and imprisonment that would end instead with your anonymous, unheralded death.

The article makes plain the international condemnation such a policy would bring. It's appalling to me that we employ people in our government to even think this way, let alone propose it in all seriousness.

The incomprehensible failure to use that single word - "torture" - notwithstanding, I think Glaberson presents the real issue here explicitly.

In the second graf of that story is this:

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques.

Is this a change from when you first posted?

In any case, the squeamishness evident here is not only despicable but inexplicable. Some of these reporters are brave enough to put themselves in danger in war-torn countries, but they can't bring themselves to write the word "torture"?

I have to wonder if editors are changing the reporters' words, deleting "torture" and inserting "intense interrogation techniques" or any of its variations.

But what scares me most about your post is the possibility of a death penalty for a guilty plea under such circumstances - years of imprisonment, torture, deprivation of basic human rights, all without any kind of legal justification. Besides the obvious perversion of justice and the violation of everything America is supposed to stand for, there's the likelihood that these men, some of them possibly murderers but now broken to the point of madness, will plead guilty not only as a means to martyrdom but simply to end their lives of horror, despair and pain.

If Obama allows this to happen, anything he promises, any of the eloquence he delivers in his speeches, all of it will taste like ashes. This proposal is beyond hypocrisy; it is vicious, murderous hypocrisy.

And despite everything we've seen from Bush, and the growing mound of broken promises from Obama, I will still have a hard time believing that we will execute these men under this policy that is straight out of Orwell by way of Kafka. After all, that's the nature of the morality tales these two prescient authors told: nightmarish incredulity.

Does NPR by any chance note its own full-fledged participation in shouting into said echo chamber?

I stopped listening to NPR years ago for precisely that reason.