File this one under the NY Times many entries under the tag Better late than never
Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.
When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods.
Look, that is total bullshit. The situation was not murky a decade ago. A decade ago I was coming to this site and reading about torture on the front page nearly every day. There was nothing unclear about it. A decade ago I was a 20 year old mall janitor, and I knew torture was torture, but somehow one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world could not be bothered to be honest with themselves, let alone the American public.
What was not clear about this?
From late 2003 to early 2004, during the Iraq War, Military Police personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency[1] committed human rights violations against prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison. They physically and sexually abused, tortured raped, sodomized, and killed prisoners.
A decade ago John Yoo was publicly arguing that the president had the right to order
the testicles of a child crushed in front of their parents, yet somehow the NY Times was unaware torture was going on?
As Emptywheel notes, the word torture was willfully obmitted:
According to McClatchy, in addition to misleading Congress, DOJ and the White House, the torture report concludes that the CIA also fed misleading information to the press: “[T]he news media were manipulated with leaks that tended to blunt criticism of the agency.”
Part of this manipulation (one the White House participated in) involved convincing the press to call torture something else, something it’s not. Enhanced interrogation. Harsh treatment.
Anything but torture.
For 10 years, journalists have willingly perpetuated this linguistic absurdity, even as more evidence came out proving the CIA used torture and not some fluffed up interrogation process, even as more and more neutral arbiters judged our torture torture.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has spent five years trying to understand and come to grips with the torture done in our name. Isn’t it time for journalists to do the same?
Back to that NY Times piece now:
But as we have covered the recent fight over the Senate report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation program – which is expected to be the most definitive accounting of the program to date – reporters and editors have revisited the issue. Over time, the landscape has shifted. Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A. inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people’s bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation.
...
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program. The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked...
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.
So like I said, better late than never I guess. Now if only there was a political party that had the courage to stand on the floor of the Senate and read the entirety of the still-classified torture-report to the American public.