NY Times's excuse for not calling waterboarding "torture" doesn't hold water

[ProSense]

The Legacy Media And Torture

This blog, along with others, compiled some anecdotes and research to show how the New York Times had always called "waterboarding" torture - until the Bush-Cheney administration came along. Instead of challenging this government lie, the NYT simply echoed it, with Bill Keller taking instructions from John Yoo on a key, legally salient etymology. Now, we have the first truly comprehensive study of how Bill Keller, and the editors of most newspapers, along with NPR, simply rolled over and became mouthpieces for war criminals, rather than telling the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to calling it such 1.4 percent of the time. Had the technique changed? No. Only the government implementing torture and committing war crimes changed. If the US does it, it's not torture

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NY Times's excuse for not calling waterboarding "torture" doesn't hold water

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The New York Times has now explained the reasoning behind its decision, and it's pretty surprising. The paper disputed the study's accuracy, but it gave Michael Calderone a statement acknowledging the shift and conceding that Bush administration entreaties were partly responsible:

"As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture," a Times spokesman said in a statement.

"When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture."

The Times' explanation is that once Bush officials started arguing that waterboarding wasn't torture, the only way to avoid taking sides was to stop using the word. But here's the problem: Not using the word also consitutes taking a side: That of the Bush administration.

That's because this debate wasn't merely a semantic one. It was occuring in a legal context.

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More GOP complicity disguised as fair and balanced. If only the NYT hadn't push the Bush admin line on Iraq.

[damntexdem]

1. Doesn't hold water, and is torturous, to boot.

Can't take sides between truth and lies -- how lame.

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. The flawed logic in the response by the NYT is so over the top BS

that it becomes an additional indictment tacked on to the long list of the NYT's complicity with the GW Bush Admin.

One need only to replace the word "torture" with "murder" or "rape" or any other appropriate word and their attempt to cover their asses becomes a miserable failure. For example, if the GW Bush Admin officials began using the words "perpetual naps" to describe the deaths of suspects frozen to death or beaten to death in US custody, would the NYT dutifully begin using those words to describe what is to rational people known as murder? Maybe Bill Keller could explain that.

Also, it should be noted that what always seems to get lost in the discussion of the issue of the US torturing prisoners is that MANY of these people were KILLED as a direct result of their "interrogations". Or, if described by the NYT's Bill Keller and crew - they were given "eternal timeouts" by their captors.

Lastly, Keller is a fraud and douchebag of the highest order. My contempt for him knows no bounds. My only hope is that someday his chickens come home to roost with a vengeance.