What’s In A Name?

by digby

Mediabloodhound does a nice job of deconstructing this mind boggling NY Times ombudsman piece about what kind of words are appropriate to describe what the United States does to its prisoners in the War On Terror. Apparently, it’s caused quite a bit of confusion among journalists and editors at the paper of record. In fact, the process of sorting it out eerily echoes the processes and reasoning of the OLC memos: comfortable people in offices somewhere sitting around dryly discussing these techniques as if they were ordering lunch, trying to find words to obscure the clear, unambiguous meaning of what was being done to human beings by the United States Government.

A short excerpt:

The bizarro world of this editorial process continues.A week later, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word. From rare use now and then, it had gone to being the preferred choice. The result of that decision was this top headline in the printed paper of April 17: “Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation.”Maybe when Abramson “consulted with several legal experts” she should have been more concerned with verifying that such techniques were indeed torture, and brought that to her Washington bureau chief, instead of dithering over the relative meaninglessness of which adjective best described her article’s subject, torture, which, ipso facto, had occurred but which she and her paper nonetheless still refuse to report.

It would be imprecise to refer to the paper’s discussions as evil in the same sense that the legal memos clearly are, but it’s very hard not to see it as a branch of the same tree. It most certainly is banal.

Now if you are Tom Friedman, you think we are dealing with Satanic Wogs who have superpowers and we cannot win unless we are willing to use any means necessary to stop them or risk annihilating the whole country. Therefore, torture is necessary. And Tom Friedman writes for the New York Times as some sort of expert on the middle east. So perhaps he has simply convinced his colleagues that even using the word torture is akin to helping the terrorists destroy our way of life.

But for normal people who prize reason and decency as basic human values, this is not a hard call at all. It doesn’t require nuance, you don’t have to weigh different responsibilities or worry about necessity. It’s not like it’s anything new.

Spanish Inquisition

Middle ages witch hunts

Khmer Rouge torture system

People used waterboarding for centuries and civilized nations have since outlawed it. We prosecuted it in WWII as a war crime. We have signed international treaties banning it.

And so too, beating, hanging people by their arms for days at a time, depriving them of sleep for weeks, putting them in boxes and body contorting “stress positions, “dietary manipulation”, sexual humiliation, forced enemas, severe psychological trauma and more are all torture. If you have lost sight of that and no longer know whether such things should be described as “harsh” or “brutal” then you have lost your judgment and are in danger of losing your humanity.

We call it torture because it is torture, by any decent standard. If those who perpetrated it want to defend it honestly then we can have a debate. But the idea that people who use words for a living and allegedly strive to tell the truth are even hesitating to call this what it clearly is tells us far more about the state of journalism today than anything else. If they can’t even do this straightforwardly, then they have truly lost their purpose.