Horton Wins a Prize

Scott Horton is the kind of bumbling, inept journalist who seems to exist only in novels. A writer for Harper’s and the Daily Beast, he constantly makes mistakes and fabulates, leaving a trail of corrections and retractions in his wake. But because he has the right politics, Horton keeps getting promoted until, last week, he ascended all the way to receipt of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. 

Handed out by the American Society of Magazine Editors each year, the NMA is more or less a Pulitzer for magazines, and Horton’s story was a blockbuster: He detailed how, in 2006, three Guantánamo Bay detainees were tortured to death by the United States, which then covered up the crime by making it look as though the inmates had committed suicide by hanging themselves.

This being Scott Horton, however, there’s the usual catch: The story is almost certainly untrue. Its veracity is so suspect, in fact, that even mainstream journalists were caught sputtering at the ludicrousness of the ASME judges in handing the prize to Horton.

From the moment he published it, there were questions about Horton’s story. (Joe Carter at First Things dissected it particularly well, and Slate’s  Jack Shafer piled on to good effect.) But last week AdWeek’s Alex Koppelman took it apart in its entirety. The gist of Koppelman’s indictment: In 2009, the government released a thousands-of-pages-long report on the deaths of the three detainees in which the government described how the men plotted and carried out their suicides. Horton constructed an alternative version of events, in which the three men were being interrogated in another part of the facility when they died, and in which the subsequent story of their suicide-by-hanging was a military cover-up.