indi.ca

9 Comments

1. 

   Indi,

   You’re rarely more amusing than when you change into your Superblogman outfit and surf off to shit on the corrupt western media from your self-perceived great ethical altitude. Let’s start with your blatant lie about the New York Times and torture. Try this link, and you’ll likely find the following line in an editorial titled “The Torture Report”: “Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.”

   You just make stuff up, don’t you?

   Which is moderately funny, until you start speaking with great authority about the coverage of yet another conflict you have never been anywhere near. True, the western powers have reduced Afghanistan, Iraq and parts of Pakistan to rubble, and for all the wrong reasons. But for all you know that could just be lies and propaganda. Unless of course your fellow superheroes the cricketers have told you what it was “really like out there”.

2. 

   That’s a nice opinion piece, but it was never really reflected in the New York Times editorial coverage. Also, even the piece you cite dances around the word. It still says ‘interrogation practices based on illegal tortures’ and ‘abusive techniques’ and ‘interrogation techniques’ where a simple ‘torture’ would suffice.

   The Times still refers to harsh and enhanced interrogation techniques like there’s a reasonable debate. I quote from an June 6th article this year:

   When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic point

   Also check out their Times Topics page on the CIA interrogations. Some of the words used include ‘questionable interrogation techniques’, ‘brutal interrogation techniques, including forced sleeplessness and waterboarding’, ‘the near-drowning technique’, ‘a night without sleep, a session of waterboarding, even a “belly slap” — in an exchange of encrypted messages. A doctor or medic was always on hand’.

   But never torture. They say ‘it might be torture’ or ‘what the red cross calls torture’ but the New York Times never calls it torture if the US does it. They do unequivocally call it torture if the Chinese do it.

   Also read the Times Topic page on torture. It never calls the acts torture. Instead they say

   But the actual limits of permissible techniques during interrogation remain unclear. In October 2007, an article in The New York Times revealed that in February 2005, shortly after Alberto R. Gonzales became attorney general, the Justice Department issued a secret memorandum on the subject. The new opinion, according to officials who had seen the document, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

   I’m not out on a limb here. Glenn Greenwald at Salon and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic have been documenting this for a long time.

   The Times still doesn’t call US torture ‘torture’. Even look at the opinion piece you cite, they say that most people recognized the torture, but the New York Times still doesn’t come out and use the word. For America.

3. 

   Also, read this bit from the New York Times Public Editor’s Journal. This is in response to the Andrew Sullivan letter cited in the China link above:

   Mazzetti and Shane [the authors] described waterboarding as “the near-drowning tactic considered by many legal authorities to be torture.” So, why not just call it torture? After all, Obama did. John McCain did. The United Nations said waterboarding is torture, and so did Tom Ridge, the first secretary of the Homeland Security Department. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told The New Yorker that if he were ever waterboarded, he’d consider it torture.

   Shane said, “Historically, the United States and other Western countries have long considered waterboarding to be illegal torture. But the Justice Department under President Bush took a different view and supported it in a series of opinions, some of which are still in effect.” That means there is an active debate, and even though the merits may seem to be heavily on one side, it is a legal question that has not been decided. Congress tried, but President Bush vetoed it.

   Douglas Jehl, Shane’s editor, said, “We always need to be very careful about taking sides in any debate.”

   Mazzetti and Shane made it pretty clear what waterboarding was – and that it is widely regarded as torture – without declaring an opinion on the matter by adopting the T-word as their own. I think that was the right thing to do, no matter what I may think of waterboarding.

   As far as the New York Times is concerned, whether the US tortures is an active debate. In the rest of the world it’s not.

4. 

   Indi,

   It’s not just an opinion piece. It’s an editorial. Which is the opinion of the newspaper.

   As is the one a couple of Google hits down, on http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02EFD91238F934A35753C1A9619C8B63
   which contains:

   “The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.”

   and:

   “The president declared that Americans do not torture prisoners and that Congress had been fully briefed on his detention policies.

   Neither statement was true — at least in what the White House once scorned as the ”reality-based community” — and Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was right to be furious.”

   or:

   “Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values.”

   And so on.

5. 

   indeed, yet they still use tortured euphemisms in their articles. Just pick one, including the one you cite. And the public editor says, in direct response to the issues

   “Mazzetti and Shane made it pretty clear what waterboarding was – and that it is widely regarded as torture – without declaring an opinion on the matter by adopting the T-word as their own. I think that was the right thing to do, no matter what I may think of waterboarding.”

   The New York Times still has not adopted the ‘T-word’ as their own. Check out any of the articles in the Times Topics

6. 

   Indi,

   Your howling in unison with your fellow conspiracy theorists is nowhere near as entertaining as your expert analysis of conflicts around the world. I’m sure you honestly believe that the New York Times is conspiring with the evil Obama regime to waterboard you and all other patriotic Sri Lankans, whilst denying that it’s torture, but from a slightly less insular perspective there might just be some nuances (look it up, useful word) you’re missing.

7. 

   Sullivan just published A Brief Recent History of the New York Times and torture. Money quote:

   So for years the NYT used the word “torture” to describe exactly the techniques used by Cheney; and a UN Committee and Israel’s Supreme Court came to the same conclusion. Despite all this, Washington editor Doug Jehl could still say with a straight face:

   “Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court… On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?”

8. 

   Indi – please correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve never seen a single English language newspaper in Colombo use the word “Torture” to describe anything committed by our own armed forces …

   …of course the exception was The Leader and unfortunately Lasantha killed himself by bashing his own head – or was it Prabhakaran who had him killed? No, no, it was RAW… but it could also have been the UNP… well, anyway somebody obviously wanted to discredit the government and slow down the “war on terrorism”

   strange, ‘coz Lasantha was also a “terrorist sympathizer” — why else would he never think twice about using the word “torture” !!

9. 

   Looks like being a professional lair himself MH does often project his way of being onto everybody around. Just cannot help it.
   There is a very little objective truth apart from some few bare facts. So there are mostly theories and more or less grounded opinions. Every each one of Morten is deadly boring. The only reason he argues with Indi is to have some traffic his way. Desperado.

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