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The new President continues to set the news agenda, even though the three networks disagreed over which aspect of Barack Obama's busy day should lead their newscasts. NBC kicked off at the State Department where Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled Obama's diplomatic agenda. ABC started with the War on Terrorism, as Obama signed executive orders to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and to order CIA interrogators to abide by Geneva Conventions. CBS took the omnibus approach, covering those two topics plus Obama's economic deliberations, his introduction to the White House press corps and his beloved BlackBerry. Gitmo, as the detention center is nicknamed, was Story of the Day.

ABC's Jake Tapper called Obama's new rules on terrorism "the most sweeping changes in national security policy, arguably, since immediately after 9/11." In addition to the order that the detention center on the naval base in Cuba should be closed within the year, the President also forbade the CIA from running any other secret detention camps and from questioning suspects with methods not condoned by the Army Field Manual.

Ordering Gitmo to be closed "was the easy part," opined NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, "it is how you do it that will be tough." Of the 250-or-so held without trial in Cuba, Miklaszewski explained that the majority can be released to their home country or put on criminal trial in the United States. There remains "a small group of hardcore accused terrorists, less than 20, who may be held indefinitely without ever facing trial because, in some cases, the evidence remains top secret." On ABC's A Closer Look Jan Crawford Greenburg did not venture such a low number. By contrast, she believed that release or trial of inmates constituted "huge questions." She wondered: "Where will these prisoners go? What kind of trials will they face?"

CBS' report from the Pentagon by David Martin was the most sanguine about Gitmo's closing. He reminded us that "the first photos of hooded and shackled prisoners being shipped to Guantanamo Bay came as a shock." He replayed the pledge by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that inmates would be detained indefinitely even if they were acquitted of being enemy combatants. He pointed out that the camp was built on Cuban soil for the sole purpose of evading the protections of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. He reported that Pentagon official Susan Crawford recently found formal evidence of torture, making prosecution impossible. "It was hard to tell which posed the greater threat. Terrorists at Guantanamo? Or the damage it has done to America's image?"


Andrew Tyndall 1/23/09 9:21:38 pm

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