The New York Times reporters who wrote about a trove of classified Iraq war military documents disclosed by Wikileaks last week will be answering questions from readers. Please submit a question using the comments form below. We will post selected questions and answers over the next few days.

Q: What do you make of Glenn Greenwald’s powerful and quite convincing critique of your coverage of the latest weak from Wikileaks?
–Z

A: (Sabrina Tavernise) We worked with what we had, which is what was in the archive. Few of the documents detailed what was happening inside American detention facilities, so the archive was not a good window into American abuse. If there were particularly egregious examples of American abuse, the archive did not show them. (Please see our piece on civilian casualties for examples of American killings of Iraqis).

The archive’s accounts of Iraqi abuse were copious, so we chose to focus on that. We said high in the piece that the American response amounted to an institutional shrug, and that the indifference was codified into a formal procedure in May, 2005. While it is true that the official policy absolved Americans of their responsibility for what the Iraqis were doing, those of us who were in Iraq in those years, and saw first-hand how Americans dealt with Iraqi units, know that their responses varied widely. Some units ignored maltreatment when they found it, but others actively tried to stop it. The torture house in central Baghdad with 95 battered detainees was discovered –- and flagged –- by an American officer. Perhaps the United States has not taken enough responsibility for what it did in Iraq, but holding the military responsible for every single act of Iraqi violence seems unrealistic. Iraq was a tremendously violent society, and standards of prisoner treatment were very different from American ones. This was a systemic problem in Iraqi society that will take much more than increased American oversight to change.

On not using the word torture: It was not intentional. I thought the verbs spoke for themselves: beat, burn and lash.

Q: Why did John Burns write the “hit piece” on Julian Assange in this weekend’s NYT?  Why did the editors allow him to publish rumor and innuendo about Assange?
–markartis

A: (John F. Burns) These readers are far from alone in condemning the profile I wrote with Ravi Somaiya, which appeared on the front page of the print editions of Sunday’s Times and was prominently displayed on the home page of our website. I’ve worked at The Times for many years, and I don’t remember ever having been the target of so much repudiation and anger over any story I’ve written in that time, including the six years after 9/11 that I spent reporting from Kabul and Baghdad. “Rumor” and “innuendo” are among the milder rebukes Ravi and I have received from the readers who have added their comments to the website version of the story (nearly 500, as I write, on Tuesday evening), and the dozens who have emailed me directly.

We’ve been called “fascists”, paid agents of the CIA and the Pentagon, and worse; the paper’s editors have been similarly condemned for allowing the piece to run at all. But the most vituperative criticism so far has been Glenn Greenwald’s on salon.com where he writes, among other things, that Ravi and I are “the Nixonian henchmen of today”, authors of “a sleazy hit piece” filled with “every tawdry, scurrilous tabloid rumor” about Mr. Assange, and that “Richard Nixon and his plumbers” could only have dreamed about “being able to dispatch journalists to dutifully smear whistle-blowers
in this fashion.” For good measure, Mr. Greenwald describes me as “a borderline sociopath” suffering from a “the guilt that one must experience for having enabled and cheered a war that led to the amount of human suffering evident in these documents.” And all this from a critic who dismisses our profile as “a smear job.”

It’s a fool who doesn’t listen to his detractors, and we have; but the abuse that has been directed at us is hard to engage, since almost none of it, including Mr. Greenwald’s polemic, contests the accuracy of what we wrote, only the fact that we wrote it at all. The main indictment of our critics has been that we conspired in cunning sabotage by writing about Mr. Assange alongside The Times’ accounts of what was in the documents; that by characterizing him as eccentric, imperious and capricious, as well as brilliant and charismatic, we “distracted” the readers and undermined the documents’ impact. Like many conspiracy theories, this one answers to our critics’ deepest suspicions and fears, and to what a supportive colleague at The Times has wryly described as their preference for a version of Mr. Assange that depicts him as a “digital St. Sebastian pierced by arrows.” But it lacks all basis in fact.

Nobody at The Times, including Bill Keller, the executive editor, instructed us as to what the piece should say, beyond the normal to-and-fro in the editing process designed to make the article more accessible, balanced and engaging to the readers.

That in itself should be a signal as to what kind of a newspaper The Times is: one not beholden to any organization, party or interest, even when we are launched into an enterprise that has made us, in the case of the Afghan and the Iraq documents, one of Mr. Assange’s “media partners.” But what we at The Times regard as balance and impartiality, the harshest of our detractors, writing from what seems to be a Manichean and Machiavellian perspective, see as a devilishly clever plot to set up Mr. Assange, the better to destroy him. Can anybody who knows The Times and its history really believe this? Mr. Assange has suggested that the root cause of the problem is that I am “a journalist of extremely bad character,” and the accuracy of that, I suppose, I shall have to leave to readers and those who have known me during my long apprenticeship at The Times.

What we hoped to accomplish in publishing the piece was to give our readers some sense of the man behind Wikileaks, and in doing so to offer wider context to the many thousands of words that we published on the documents themselves, and to our similar endeavor this summer on Wikileaks’ Afghan documents. If there was any pressure, it came from the complexity of the assignment -– much of it spent chasing shadows, so elusive have Mr. Assange and some of his principal associates made themselves, and so opaque much that we felt we needed to know to understand the man and his organization.

That effort alone pointed up one of the paradoxes — contradictions, if you will — in Wikileaks’ operation, since it showed how an organization that has dedicated itself to a world of “information without borders,” where there are no secrets that are sacrosanct, has itself adopted many of the covert and secretive habits it condemns. In our case, Mr. Assange eluded us for two months, failing to respond to countless emails and telephone calls, and slipping back into the shadows even as I pursued him to Sweden in the late summer. We finally obtained a current cellphone number for him only days before the Iraq logs were scheduled to be published, leading to the lunch Ravi and I had with him at a London restaurant on October 17th. After interviewing dozens of WikiLeaks people about Mr. Assange and the organization, many of them critical of him, some not, achieving a balance in the piece made talking to the man himself absolutely crucial.

Rereading the story as objectively as any reporter can, I cannot see how it can be depicted as a character assassination; had it been, be assured, Times’ editors would never have published it. We set out to give Mr. Assange full credit for the extraordinary -– if deeply controversial –- accomplishments of WikiLeaks, describing him as a man “of near genius IQ” who is “redefining whistle-blowing” for the Internet age, and as the “prime innovator and charismatic force” behind the organization he founded.

We quoted him liberally from our lunch encounter, citing his response to each of his detractors’ criticisms. We described the frightening circumstance he now finds himself in, pursued, as he sees it, by the Pentagon and the CIA, haunted by the possibility of imprisonment under the U.S. Espionage Act, and as he said at a London forum after our article appeared, wondering if he will end up living in Moscow or Havana. But we also discovered, from talking to dozens of people who have worked with Mr. Assange within WikiLeaks, or supported him along his nomad’s way, that he, like many innovators and radicals who have changed history, has his flaws, and that these, too, have influenced the way in which WikiLeaks operates.

Life, as most of us know, is a patchwork of light and dark, and so it is with Mr. Assange. But our critics would appear not to want a true-to-life portrait, if they want any at all, but something altogether more hagiographic, something that places a halo on the head of a man who, many seem to believe, will lead the world to a promised land beyond secrets, and official malfeasance, and unjust wars.

All I would ask of those who condemn Ravi and I for our attempt to portray him in the round is this: What kind of a world would it be if, in the cause of truth and justice, as these critics see it, we were to eliminate inconvenient truths? And what kind of newspaper would The Times be if we made the judgment that the ends to be served by the WikiLeaks documents demanded that we suppress what we have learned about Mr. Assange himself? Those, surely, are lessons the world has learned, and relearned, through a century and more of millennial ideologies that have promised brave new worlds.