The NYT's Tim Golden wrote a story on a stomach-turning case of abuse at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan.

He talked to CJR Daily's Mariah Blake about the series, how he sourced it and the timing of its publication, coming on the heels of the Newsweek/Koran mess.

Some excerpts:

 TG: I started out this year thinking I would work on a couple of very different subjects. But the more we thought about it, the more it struck us that there was probably a good story waiting to be done about the secret detention system in Afghanistan. Several of my colleagues had written good stories about the abuses at Bagram, and the two detainees who died in custody there in December 2002. In March 2004, Doug Jehl got ahold of a summary report on the Army's criminal investigation, and it was pretty horrifying stuff.

But it seemed like there was probably more there, and so I set out to try to track down soldiers who had served there and others who might be able to tell the story of how Bagram had worked. I figured out that the Army's criminal investigators had already been most everywhere I was going, so I began trying see if I couldn't get a copy of their full report. Once I got the file, it was just a matter of making sense of all the pieces, constructing a narrative and filling in blanks. ...

MB: A few conservative bloggers and pundits have questioned the timing of the series. Glen Reynolds (Instapundit) went as far as suggesting that The New York Times was trying to avert attention from the Newsweek ordeal by running it. What would you say to these critics?

TG: I am reluctant to respond to people who call themselves by names like "Instapundit." I certainly support scrutiny of the press; the Times is a big, powerful institution and I think it should be accountable to the public. But a lot of our self-appointed critics don't make much of an effort to base their opinions on facts. Nor do they seem to understand much about the way that newspapers work.

We had a story that we thought was very important. Disrespecting the Koran is obviously a terrible thing, but here you had more than two dozen American servicemen allegedly beating to death a couple of young detainees -- at least one of whom was known to be innocent -- at a flagship operations base of the War on Terror. You had a criminal inquiry that both Army investigators and military lawyers moved to close down without charging anyone. So while we were certainly sensitive to the passions that had been inflamed by the Newsweek episode, we were not going to sit around waiting for the wires to clear before we published what we thought was important news.