IN "Silver Blaze," one of the most popular of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's celebrated Sherlock Holmes stories, the following exchange occurs between the great detective and an Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard:
Gregory: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes: "That was the curious incident."
The dog in question was supposed to be guarding the missing racehorse, Silver Blaze, and the fact that the horse was removed from its stable without the dog making a sound led Holmes to conclude that the silent canine knew the thief. A phrase extrapolated from the story -- "the dog that didn't bark" -- now defines an informal category of forensic logic that discerns hard truth in a significant silence.
If you followed this week's news reports on the confession given a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay by the Al Qaeda killer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, you may have noticed a peculiar silence among the usual media watchdogs.
Among all his various admissions, two were particularly chilling: One was his acceptance of total responsibility for the atrocities committed on Sept. 11, 2001. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," the U.S.-educated onetime engineer told the tribunal. The other was his pseudo-pious description of murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. According to the transcript released by military authorities, Mohammed told the panel, "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."
As you might expect, this confession set the pundit pack baying in full cry. We've now had 72 hours of faux-Churchillian fulmination on "evil" and "monsters" and "the clash of civilizations" and "a new era" that makes no allowance for the old-fashioned niceties concerning human rights and due process. But there's a dog that hasn't barked, and its silence speaks volumes concerning one of the American news media's fundamental failures in covering the Bush administration's response to 9/11.
