Just a brief follow-up on my earlier complaints about the “scorecard” approach to detainee litigation coverage.
In this post from ten days back, I argued that–among its other problems–the press’s tendency simply to tally wins and losses in Guantanamo habeas cases ignores the qualitative dimensions of these cases and the rules that emerge from them. The coverage of the D.C. Circuit’s argument Friday in Salahi is a great example of this. To wit, there has been almost no coverage. NPR did a brief but excellent setup piece, to which I would link, but which I can’t seem to access online. The Associated Press ran this piece, the Washington Post this one. That’s about all the coverage I’ve been able to find so far (there may be other stories that I haven’t seen, but there are not a whole lot of them). By contrast, think how many stories you have read recently that casually cite one iteration or another of the Guantanamo scorecard.
