JAMES TARANTO

Two days before Barack Obama took office as president, the New York Times weighed in with an editorial--not its first--denouncing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for violating the rights of terrorists:

In a long series of valedictory speeches and interviews, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been crowing about Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and abusive interrogations, claiming they met the highest legal standards and that no prisoner had been tortured. Fortunately, the truth broke through the noise, in the words of some of the very people ordered to carry out the policies. . . .

That is the real nature of Mr. Bush's grotesque legacy: abuse and torture at an outlaw prison where hundreds of men--many of whom did nothing--have been held for years without real evidence or charges. And truly dangerous men were treated so badly that it may be impossible to bring them to justice.
This weekend, however, a news story carried the headline "Guantánamo Meets Geneva Rules, Pentagon Study Finds." And this is not a study from the bad Bush Pentagon:

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.

The story appears in . . . the New York Times. Of course the Times editorialists could not have known in January about a report that would not be commissioned for days or completed for a month. But surely they are embarrassed to have gotten the facts so wrong.
Tim Rutten does not have the defense that he could not have known. The Los Angeles Times columnist this Saturday published an anti-Guantanamo rant similar to that Times editorial:

Of all the collateral damage America suffered on 9/11, none may have been more catastrophic than the Bush/Cheney administration's rejection of our established civilian and military legal systems to deal with the country's criminal enemies. In fact, the murky, torture-ridden parallel gulag they tried to create may have pushed some of the most culpable Al Qaeda criminals--like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind--nearly beyond the reach of justice.

An L.A. Times news story the same day reported on the Obama Pentagon findings.
Everyone is entitled to his opinion, of course. But the Times editorialists and Rutten seem to think that they are immune from Pat Moynihan's dictum that no one is entitled to his own facts.