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You are here: Home / Politics / Torture / Johnny Come Lately

Johnny Come Lately

by | 45 Comments

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Isn’t this swell:

Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.

What a bold stance. Now that we are allegedly no longer torturing (who the hell knows what the CIA is doing really, as they are quite clearly a rogue agency), and you can no longer suffer repercussions from the Bush/Cheney goon squad, NOW you are going make the editorial call. Thanks, guys!

it’s a good thing, but it took you a fucking decade?

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  1. 1.

    Roger Moore

    you can no longer repercussions from the Bush/Cheney goon squad

    Don’t be so sure about that. I’ve heard that Liz Cheney is very talented at breaking kneecaps.

  3. 3.

    Iowa Old Lady

    @Roger Moore: Geez. I dismiss Ann Coulter as your standard nasty grifter, but Liz Cheney makes a chill run down my spine.

    Also, spellcheck tried to make Ann Coulter into a grafter. Maybe some evil poison plant onto an apple tree.

  5. 5.

    Elizabelle

    I’m glad to see the NYTimes adult up.

    And I am glad to see Senator John Walsh step aside as Montana Senate candidate. What a mess, but a better chance with another candidate. Montana is not as dreadful for Democrats as one might assume, and this one was tarnished beyond belief.

  9. 9.

    Amir Khalid

    It’s hard to credit Baquet’s argument. Nothing in the terminology ever changed. The W administration’s claims that it did not torture were always bullshit, in the formal sense of the term. Inflicting pain to elicit information is torture now and it was plainly torture then; that’s why people called it that.

  10. 10.

    Hungry Joe

    Well, it’s in keeping with their earlier, equally bold decisions to use the word “lynching” to describe incidents in which they knew for sure that racist mobs hanged black people, and “Bundt cakes” to describe cakes that are baked in Brundts.

  11. 11.

    bliekker

    The Times? Well, they’ve decided all the dead Palestinians in Gaza are the fault of Hamas, so…

  15. 15.

    big ole hound

    Immoral means you know the difference between right and wrong and choose the latter. Amoral means you have no clue what is right or wrong. Which is the Cheney family?

  16. 16.

    PsiFighter37

    Better late than never? Maybe they could apologize for Judy fucking Miller while they’re at it.

  17. 17.

    Tom Levenson

    Hey, I haven’t got my dates at my fingertips, but it took the grey lady until the 1930s to switch away from “bandits” as the term to denote the Chinese Communist Party. That lot was many things…but bandits was a truly uninformative descriptor. The newspaper of record’s wheels grind sure, but exceedingly slow.

  19. 19.

    danielx

    What a bold editorial stance, to call a spade a fucking shovel!

    Will wonders ever cease….

  20. 20.

    Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)

    Should we laud progress or excoriate it for being too slow? They are going to use the correct term from now on. Good.

  23. 23.

    some guy

    the Times is one of the most duplicitous news organizations in America. one act of cowardice down, 100s more to go.

  25. 25.

    maya

    The NYT has always dressed right. My Republican father got all 8 lbs of it every Sunday. I never liked it because they didn’t have funny pages.
    All these years later I have come to realize I was wrong about that.

  26. 26.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Elizabelle:

    Once again, it is certainly not the first time that a Democrat has fucked up, but when bad news emerges, our guys seem to be pretty good at resigning quickly and (usually) contritely. The Repugnants, OTOH, almost always seem to either deny and push back, or tearfully confess their sins to an admiring crowd of reporters and supporters (sorry for the redundancy), and go on to re-election.

  27. 27.

    SiubhanDuinne

    O/T, but it looks like it’s going to rain like a sumbitch here in about ten minutes. Raven, JPL, SIA, other metro ATL types, what do things look like over your way?

  29. 29.

    Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)

    @Keith G:

    Obama administration stops resisting promised transparency

    Is this a reference to the promise to be the most transparent administration ever? Just noting that most transparent does not mean completely transparent. FTR, on this issue, I do side with wanting more rather than less information in the released report.

  30. 30.

    SiubhanDuinne

    The sky here is a really weird kind of yellow grey, and the wind is whipping up something fierce!

  35. 35.

    NotMax

    @raven

    All set for hunker down mode. So long as the roof stays on, should be okay.

    Largest mall on the island closing at 3 p.m. today, all schools closed Thursday and Friday, bus service to be suspended by 5 this afternoon, airport closure likely around the same time, mayor has already put a state of emergency into place. Predicted power outages certainly a concern.

  40. 40.

    Cervantes

    @big ole hound: “Amoral” means “not within the ambit of moral sense,” or “not concerned with morality.”

    And yes, there’s always been an ample supply of it.

  41. 41.

    Roger Moore

    @Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):

    Is this a reference to the promise to be the most transparent administration ever?

    I think it’s a reference to the dispute between the Administration and Dianne Feinstein about redactions in the CIA torture report. Feinstein is upset, AFAIK about both the degree of redaction and because she thinks they’re trying to redact things in ways that change the meaning of the report. She’s refusing to release it until they scale back the redactions to what she sees as acceptable for security, not political cover.

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)

    @Roger Moore: I know the substance of the dispute; I was referring to the specific phrasing that Keith G used.

  43. 43.

    James E. Powell

    No doubt the NYT was emboldened by the fact that nearly everyone is focusing his wrath on Obama – for not stopping it, for stopping it, for refusing to talk about it, for talking about it. You know, electing a black president turned out to be a really handy thing for a lot of America’s total assholes.

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