I hate to admit this, but I find the torture debate so depressing that I can’t follow it anymore. But Greg Sargent (via Andrew Sullivan, who on this topic at least, is excellent) has summarized the media decision to drop the T-word quite well:
The decision to refrain from calling waterboarding “torture” is tantamount to siding with the Bush administration’s claim that the act it acknowledged doing is not illegal under any statute. No one is saying the Times should have adopted the role of judge and jury and proclaimed the Bush administration officially guilty. Rather, the point is that by dropping use of the word “torture,” it took the Bush position — against those who argued that the act Bush officials sanctioned is already agreed upon as illegal under the law.
Think of it this way: We all agree that pickpocketing constitutes “theft.” A pickpocket doesn’t get to come along and argue: “No, what I did isn’t theft, it’s merely pickpocketing, and therefore it isn’t illegal.” Any newspaper that played along with a pickpocket’s demand to stop using the word “theft” would be taking the pickpocket’s side, not occupying any middle ground. There is no middle ground here.
No, there is no middle ground. It’s torture or it’s not and by not calling it torture, the Times is taking a side. The pickpocketing/theft analogy Sargent draws is a good one. Remember when Dick Cheney didn’t shoot that guy but only “peppered” him?
(Yes, I realize that stealing and robbery are in fact different things, I just like that song and thought it was somewhat apropos.)
Kryptik
It’s not war. It’s Preemptive Defense.
It’s not oligarchy. It’s corporate legal sponsorship.
It’s not unemployment. It’s temporary personal financial disturbance.
I know what George Carlin would think about this, but I don’t think he regrets not living to see the NYTimes blatantly defend this bullshit.
Linda Featheringill
You’re right. Cool song.
But refusing to say “torture” was quite widespread. I remember the [pleasant] shock I experienced when some actually said the word.
I am not defending the folks at NYT. They are, to a man, tougher than I am and can defend themselves. But I am saying that they were not alone in committing this particular sin.
MikeJ
Why doesn’t Sargent ask about The Post while he’s at it? Has he taken the old saw about the Times being the only newspaper worth criticizing to heart?
geg6
Don’t know why but when I saw the thread title, I was sure this would be something about Sarah Palin. Can’t imagine where that came from.
And as I said in another thread, I can’t wait til all these fuckers die. And I really don’t give a damn how many vapors it gives Jeffrey Goldberg.
bkny
and don’t discount the role that ’24’ and ‘don’t tase me, bro’ played — along with the collusion of the liberal, pointy-headed, east coast media elite.
Howlin Wolfe
The cowardly Times could have hedged honorably by saying something like “. . . waterboarding, which most legal authorities consider torture, and have prosecuted it as a war crime, . . . “. But they are real chickenshits, and they want to be on top when they ride the failed capitalism of this country down in flames. Heckuva job, Punchy!
Zifnab
The media took Bush’s side a long time ago on a whole host of issues. When ABC decided the Iraq War just wasn’t worth covering. When you had the NYT and the WaPo allowing Joe Wilson’s wife to get outted as a CIA agent. During the ’00 and ’04 elections, when Al Gore invented the internet and John Kerry needed to have his purple heart investigated.
We’ve been having the torture debate for years now, and every day the “debate” goes on, the media seems intent on giving a little more ground to the pro-torture movement.
And, at the end of the day, it shouldn’t even be a god-damn issue. People shouldn’t need to call water boarding torture to recognize it is illegal. US courts have already prosecuted foreign military and civilians for use of water boarding. US laws already forbid the use of harsh interrogation techniques. You can call it torture or you can call it enhanced interrogation or you can call it “petting the adorable kitten” and it shouldn’t matter.
The real villainy the NYT perpetrates is continuing this mockery of a “debate”, rather than treating water boarding as the unprosecuted crime that it is.
El Cid
As a New York Times editor, I must clarify that although we did clearly state that the Bush administration was giving cocaine and methampetamine — two substances which many consider to be illegal — to children, in exchange for money, on the White House lawn, it would have been irresponsible to take a side on a political debate about terms and label this activity “drug dealing” or “criminal”.
On the other hand, we should harshly condemn Hamas for regularly torturing those charged as informants and we are slightly uncomfortable with Israel’s justified, although overly harsh and not planned well, shooting of 9 alleged Turkish terrorists repeatedly in the heads and backs while they were trying to perhaps smuggle weapons into Gaza for Hezbollah and Iran.
Kryptik
@MikeJ:
I’m seeing the criticism as less focused on the NYT in specific, so much as the exact excuse and rationale that everyone used, but NYT just put into words so limply.
cleek
it’s definitely not just the Times.
i’ve been pissed at NPR for a long time about their refusal to use the word. Greenwald went a few rounds with them, last year. but nothing changed, AFAIKT.
liberal media strikes again.
El Cid
@MikeJ: True, but it was the New York Times which had an executive speak on the record that it chose not to use the word ‘torture’ because of Bush Jr. administration and Republican complaints.
sparky
@Zifnab:
well, that would be looking backwards, not forwards, and we can’t have that. especially now as some members of the current administration are now also subject to prosecution for various war crimes.
DougJ
@geg6:
I wanted to use that title for a Palin post, but let’s face it, she *could* rob.
DougJ
@Linda Featheringill:
For me, it’s interesting when it’s the Times, precisely because I do respect the Times, in general.
Lev
I just read Charles Simic’s essay about Serbia from a year or two ago, where he talks about how intellectuals and journalists in the country did nothing to stop the war crimes and excesses of Milosevic’s reign, and mostly just enabled the man. One sentence stuck with me, about how the only time these people cried was when one of their own was killed.
Of course, it’s not like this is an original idea. Orwell wrote on the same theme many years ago. These sorts of people are the ones with the most to lose. Ed Murrow is remembered as a tough and gutsy journalist for helping to take down Joe McCarthy, but what most people don’t remember is that Bill Paley fired him shortly afterward. They are just a part of the power structure, but they won’t admit it. If they could, maybe they could correct for it.
Not that it really matters. It’s always been the pamphleteers that have spread the truth that nobody wants to speak. Tom Payne did it in the Revolutionary War, William Lloyd Garrison during the slavery era, and so on. These guys had nothing to lose. I think that’s the key ingredient here.
Maude
While we’re at it, the NYT didn’t publish the wiretap information for a year.
Judith Miller also. too.
Eisenhower would be spitting mad about this sugarcoating of torture.
Barbaric, cruel and psychopathic behavior by the US government is not acceptable.
I wonder if the news folks are trying to CYA by not stating the facts and playing word games. They didn’t raise a stink when they first heard about the torture of Muslim men.
The issue isn’t going away.
sparky
@DougJ: i do as well, but i think it is unrealistic to expect what is in essence the house paper of the Establishment to not routinely kowtow to that Establishment. i suppose, given the general state of affairs in the Empire these days, it’s a surprise they disagree as much as they do with the powers that is [sic].
Roger Moore
@Kryptik:
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Minitru is Hiring.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
The primary problem is the public. Too many people just don’t care, or care enough to bother themselves to find out just what waterboarding is. They hear someone calling it torture, then Liz Cheney comes on their teevee all sweet faced outraged that anyone could possibly think squeaky clean Americans could torture anyone, and spew nonsense about “enhanced interrogation techniques” and us doing the same thing to our own soldiers. Not to mention the gall of smearing her sweet pappy. The corporate media can read polls, and won’t risk losing viewers when clear majorities of them don’t have a problem with what we hung Japanese officers for doing in WW2. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Just one more example of a decaying empire.
Paul L.
The “study” disingenuously uses words that describe methods of torture using water as being the same as waterboarding.
LittlePig
@sparky: well, that would be looking backwards, not forwards, and we can’t have that. especially now as some members of the current administration are now also subject to prosecution for various war crimes.
Bingo.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Paul L.: You have done some wanking here over the years, but this comment could win the grand prize. You sound like BoB sniffing glue.
Omnes Omnibus
@Paul L.:
You mean it uses various terms for simulated drowning that all refer to simulated drowning? Fail.
El Cid
@Paul L.: Next time try reading the quote you reprint.
Zifnab
@Paul L.: Sorry. All I read was Duke Lacross, Duke Lacross, Duke Lacross. Must have left my pie filter on. Could you repeat?
Sentient Puddle
If you can find a way to work the name of the song into the title of a post, you would win the Internet. Assuming that the post was not about a woman breaking and entering through the bathroom.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@sparky:
If you have evidence of these “war crimes”, I suggest you present it. I might join you in calling for such prosecution of this administration. Though I am skeptical, admittedly. But always open to facts.
Paul L.
@Omnes Omnibus:
Nothing simulated about the drowning in the Water cure.
But that is Wiki
So according to the “study” causing something to experience the sensations of drowning is the same as pouring water down their throat.
Epic Fail
JGabriel
DougJ:
Raised On Robbery does seem destined to become the Palin family theme song.
It really doesn’t take much imagination to see Bristol or Sarah on a hotel barstool trying to pick up someone with lines like “I’m a pretty good cook, sitting on groceries. Come up to my kitchen. I’ll show you my best recipes.”
.
Zifnab
@Paul L.:
Everybody back up. I think Paul L just won the argument. You see, if you torture someone by forcing him to ingest vast amounts of water, that is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than forcing said person to experience simulated drowning.
Ergo, neither are torture. Ergo, perfectly legal. QED, bitches!
Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Yoo – err, I mean Paul L – has a class he needs to get back to teaching in law school.
El Cid
There are a bunch of right wing retards who get all hot and bothered by a news report which errs on the caliber and type of ammunition or gun used, because they’re needledick obsessives.
El Cid
@Zifnab: The presumption is that waterboarding cannot be a subset of the category water torture.
frankdawg
Hang on a minute! American’s do not torture. We all learned this in school, only evil countries torture. Boy Blunder and most of the blathering gasbags his administration sent out all told us “America does not torture!”
ERGO – if we do it it is not torture Q.E.D.
If the President does it is is legal
The wingnuts have won, because everyone knows there is no more liberal member of the liberal media than the NYTimes and the Whore Post. The inconvenient fact that they supported and promoted both the illegal war & these war crimes can safely be ignored.
Stefan
causing something to experience the sensations of drowning
The sensation of drowning is the same as drowning. There’s no way to have someone experience the “sensation of drowning” without cutting off their air supply through the use of water, which is, you guessed it, drowning.
It’s like saying “I didn’t stab him, I only caused him to experience the sensation of stabbing by pressing a knife into his skin until the skin broke and the knife entered his body….”
Paul L.
@Stefan:
Wiki
Sentient Puddle
@Paul L.: Small difference of opinion, but I think this is the more important part:
kay
You don’t brutalize or torture people who are in your custody, because you took responsibility for their well-being when you made it impossible for them to escape or defend themselves. That’s what “custody” means.
A bound and detained and helpless prisoner belongs to his captor. Everyone has a human responsibility to refrain from brutalizing the helpless, and prisoners are helpless.
Its simply wrong to take him prisoner and deny responsibility for his care, and that’ s been recognized a really long time. Either you allow him to defend himself, care for himself, or you defend him from others, and care for him. There’s no middle ground. The custodian can’t drop the duty using some legal construct.
It’s really disturbing to me, and I feel it has huge ramifications for anyone who may be 1. a custodian or, 2. in custody, that conservatives have managed to convince us that there’s no duty there. It’s always been there. They can’t argue it away.
satby
@Sentient Puddle:
Why don’y you and Paul L go get waterboarded a few times and let us know what you think: torture, or springlike rain?
satby
Kay broke the thread, not me.
Sentient Puddle
@satby: Erm…for what it’s worth, I am most assuredly of the opinion that waterboarding is torture. I don’t think I need to try it out.
Interrobang
“Ingestion” isn’t the same as “inhalation” and dying of hyponatremia doesn’t mean you drowned. Granted, dead is dead, but it ain’t gonna say “drowning” on the coroner’s report.
Gregory
This, this, a million times this.
And to top it off, the Times, and NPR, and the rest of those rancid cowards, are taking the side of bad faith actors who will call them part of the “liberal media” whenever it suits their purposes.
mclaren
What’s the difference? Torture has been legalized and fully integrated into everyday life, so the “debate” about torture is over.
Police now use tasers to torture everyone from 10-year-old kids to 86-year-old grannies in their beds, and the judges love it. The prosecutors love it. The police chiefs love it. And the public hasn’t squealed, so the debate’s over.
Torture won. America is now Torture Nation. All torture, all the time. Ask “Why?” or lie on a roadway with a broken back pleading for help or sit up in your sickbed with an “aggressive posture,” and a cop will whip out a taser and torture you to death with it. And the public will applaud.
Coming soon: the handheld microwave pain ray, successor to the taser. Much more painful. You’ll scream like an animal and beg for death when the cops use that microwave pain ray on you for jaywalking.
America, where every hospitality suite is now Room 101.
Lex
Actually, given the clarity of the language of the UN Convention Against Torture, I’m saying that that is EXACTLY what the Times should have done.