It’s a remarkable tale: a former prison guard from Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay travels to London to reunite with two prisoners he helped watch.
The BBC first reported the story, and Salon.com picked it up yesterday, writing:
Driven by guilt over the treatment of detainees (including his own actions) at Gitmo, [Brandon] Neely, who has since left the army, has traveled to Britain — the BBC reported this week — to personally apologize to a number of now-released detainees he had overseen.
It was a notable BBC piece … back when it was published in 2010.
Salon writer Natasha Lennard missed the dateline on the piece, mistook it for something recent and wrote the piece.
Someone with the username MTurn pointed out the mistake in the comments section of the story:
Salon subsequently added an “Update” to the top of the piece to note the date issue:
Updated: This story was initially posted by the BBC on January 12, 2010. We regret the error.
A reader who continues on to the original text will encounter the line about the BBC story being published “this week.” But aside from that, it’s not immediately clear to a reader why Salon would add that update to its story.
And by “update” I mean correction, though it’s for some reason not labeled as such. Nor is it listed on Salon’s corrections page. An update should be used to indicate new information, not to indicate a reporting error.
I emailed Salon’s Interim Editor-in-Chief David Daley earlier today to ask why it’s an update rather than correction. I’ll, er, update if I hear back from him.
