When is torture not torture?

Posted on July 6th, 2010 by ecthompson md

Glenn has spent a couple of days talking about a study from Harvard’s Kennedy School. Glenn ended with the NYT editor basically stating that they were intellectually dishonest. At least that’s how I read the statement. (I’ll have more to say about this later. I blockquoted everything that Glenn wrote to avoid confusion.) Here’s what Glenn said:

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as “torture” for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate.  Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that “taking a side” is precisely what the NYT did:  by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture.  Yesterday, the NYT‘s own Brian Stelter examined this controversy and included a justifying quote from the paper’s Executive Editor, Bill Keller, that is one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I’ve seen from a high-level media executive in some time (h/t Jay Rosen):

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

Whether an interrogation technique constitutes “torture” is what determines whether it is prohibited by long-standing international treaties, subject to mandatory prosecution, criminalized under American law, and scorned by all civilized people as one of the few remaining absolute taboos.  But to The New York Times‘ Executive Editor, the demand that torture be so described, and the complaint that the NYT ceased using the term the minute the Bush administration commanded it to, is just tendentious political correctness: nothing more than trivial semantic fixations on a “term of art” by effete leftists.  Rather obviously, it is the NYT itself which is guilty of extreme “political correctness” by referring to torture not as “torture” but with cleansing, normalizing, obfuscating euphemisms such as ”the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks” and “intense interrogations.”  Intense.  As Rosen puts it:  “So, Bill Keller, ‘the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks’ is plainspeak and ‘torture’ is PC?  Got it.”

Worse, to justify his paper’s conduct, Keller adds “that defenders of the practice of water-boarding, ‘including senior officials of the Bush administration,’ insisted that it did not constitute torture.”  Kudos to Keller for admitting who dictates what his newspaper says and does not say (redolent of how Bush’s summoning of NYT officials to the Oval Office caused the paper to refrain from reporting his illegal NSA program for a full year until after Bush was safely re-elected).  Senior Bush officials said it wasn’t torture; therefore, we had to stop telling our readers that it is.

Tags: Media, Torture // 3 Comments »

  • Joe White

    Dr Thompson wrote:

    “the few remaining absolute taboos”

    And for the left, that is part of the problem because they have spent decades trying to convince everyone that there is NO absolute right or wrong, i.e. that right and wrong are subjective, just a matter of opinion and nothing else.

  • ecthompson

    1) I didn't say that Glenn did. I'm sorry that I didn't make that clearer.
    2) People change and movements change. There are some absolutes at least as Glenn as defined his argument. I tend to agree.

    Thanks for your comments.

  • Joe White

    Greenwald doesnt seem to be sure if absolutes exist or not.

    “Well, I think clearly the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks or the people who just unleashed that terrorist attack in Mumbai and so many others over the past several years, if anything, embodies evil. I think it's fair to say that they do. To say that the world is not divisible into pure evil and pure good is not to deny the existence of pure evil.

    Pure evil exists. It's just the exception and not the rule. And to view the world in these clean and clear and absolute moral categories will inevitably lead you astray. It'll do worse than lead you astray. It'll lead you to abandon the moral principles that you claim make you on the side of good in the first place. ” http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12122008/tran…

    I suspect that for him , as for most liberals, it exists when it's politically convenient, and doesn't exist when it's politically inconvenient.

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