The Torturous Logic of The New York Times
With President Bush's veto this weekend of a bill to outlaw the CIA's use of waterboarding, torture now becomes officially codified U.S. policy. But you'd never know it from the reading The New York Times.
At least, not the news pages. Yes, there was a prominent Times story this Sunday on the veto written by Washington-based reporter Steven Lee Meyers. But the only suggestion in the piece that we're actually talking about torture is the painful and intellectually insulting acrobatics and contortions that the reporter puts us through in avoiding any direct mention of the terrible T-word. The best Meyers can do is to refer to what he calls "harsh interrogation techniques." (You know, like calling really shoddy, third-rate journalism "something less than spectacular reporting").
As to waterboarding itself -- a centuries-old method of torture that became commonplace in the interrogation dungeons of various Latin American dictatorships a few decades back -- Meyers describes it blandly as "a technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning..." You know, like we tie your to hands to a chair with silk ribbons and wave a bucket of water in front of your nose instead of ...what? Maybe, actually tying you down to a board and, well, drowning you?
The American Heritage Dictionary defines drowning as "to kill by submerging and suffocating in water or another liquid." This is a precise definition of waterboarding with perhaps one asterisk: the torturer has the option of stopping the process right before death -- or proceeding until death occurs. Or did I miss something?
To the shame of the reporter and editors on this Times story, readers can find out the harsh truths about waterboarding torture in the very same Sunday edition of the paper, but a few pages deeper into the book. Former Nixon speechwriter and conservative pundit William Safire devotes his popular "On Language" column this week to the "bland bureaucratic euphemisms [that] conceal great crimes." The title of the column is, indeed, "Waterboarding." And Safire comes right to the point:
If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for "twist," means anything (and it means "the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce"), then waterboarding is a means of torture. The predecessor terms for its various forms are water torture, water cure and water treatment....Why did boarding take over from cure, treatment and torture? Darius Rejali, the author of the recent book "Torture and Democracy" and a professor at Reed College, has an answer: "There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding" -- a word found as early as 1929 -- "they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them."
Safire makes a chilling point. Our national political discourse, and our paper of record, have adopted the dehumanizing language of the torturers themselves rather than honestly describing the torture they inflict. How embarrassing can it get for the Times that its conservative columnist Safire is more willing to accurately portray the "great crimes" of a conservative administration that is its own "objective" news staff.
Talk about the gag reflex!
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it's unbelievable that this is the only blog on this site that to my knowledge that even discucced bush's veto. its was barely coverered in the news. the citizen's and the media don't care that the we're torturing people. bush is able to get away with what he does (as do all politicians) because we the people let them. bush should have been impeached long ago, after we found that his iraq war was based on a lie, and after all the scandals that were breaking just about every week not that long ago. but we the people didn't demand it, and therefore our representatives didn't do it. 90 percent of our attention is being spent on the upcoming election, on whose up, whose down, but not on the real issues that drive the election, and we are not paying any attention to what is happenning in the world and our country now.
The New York Times has taken a nose dive into the spread of ignorance and deceit as has occured with most of our American institutions. The victim here: The American people. Until the American people wake up out of their consumer zombie state and vote for change, all will continue to decay in America, and China will laugh all the way to the Bank. George W.Bush has been waging a war against the American people for 8 years now. The Iraq war has had no benefit to the American people whatsoever, but several quasi government companies have made trillions. No treasure has been won for the American people. If torturing people, at the very least , led to millions of barrels of oil for the American consumer, perhaps there would be a twisted logic to it, but gasoline at the American pump is more expensive than ever and the rich just get filthy rich, not a coincidence. And yet the American people continue to allow the extreme right wing to wage war in Iraq through inaction. This is not an accident.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley put forth a warning on the model for future facist success. Make the masses sift through so much information that they cannot make heads or tails out of anything. Beware of media pundits, surrogates, talking heads and the New York Times.
If an American soldier were waterboarded as a prisoner of war, does anyone doubt the Bush administration would label this conduct as "torture." Why then can we do it, when we would try someone for a war crime, as we have in the past, if done to us? Well, Bush does make a distinction between combatants and terrorists. But we will never fight a war where we see combatants dressed as soldiers again. All wars in the future will be like Iraq where combatants disappear into the surrounding population. Therefore, we must reclaim our moral authority by honoring the Geneva convention and no longer making false distinctions between combatants and non-combatants.
HuffPost's Pick
Meyers piece in the Times describes waterboarding as a "technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning." This technique does not consist of threatening someone with drowning, rather it is the actually drowning of a person stopping just short of where one's lungs fill with water and he can no longer breathe. In other words, done a second or two too long and a "subject" drowns. Meyers desription makes it sound as if one is being threatened with being served cold soup for lunch.
Language is important. It should clarify and not obfuscate. Why do we even do this practice honor by calling it a "technique?" It is torture plain and simple. Would we label it a "technique" if we snapped off someone's fingers with a pliers? With the apt use of language, the Bush administration has de-sensitized us to torture and their other criminal practices. Waterboarding becomes a "coercive technique," as civilian casualties have become "collateral damage" in the war on terror. When we reclaim the constitution after Bush mercifully leaves office, we must reclaim our language so it will again say what we mean it to say and does not simply serve a hidden agenda.
Words are the most powerful weapons ever invented,
they stir, they heal, they incite, they inspire. And action
if done at the right time, can change the course of history.
But...the trick is to know the right time. In some sense
we are being bombarded with "shock & awe". The weird
effect is it doesn't work to wipe out anything. In fact,
it releases a lot of what civilized "man" has hidden.
You wouldn't know that Bush had vetoed the ban on torture from the Huffington Post either--except for your blog, which is the first mention I have seen so far. Nothing under Politics, much less on the front page! Has this become just another celebrity watch tabloid?
So much for the "fourth" estate. It has now become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the propaganda of the other estates.
Isn't it remarkable how the Times just falls in lockstep with the Wingnut "narrative" that this is a controversy about the definition of torture?
Which of course obscures the real issue that the USA is using torture. If there was any doubt that doubt was done away with Bush's veto.
Get a clue NYT. Torture was outlawed in 1791 when the Eighth Amendment f the Constitution was finally ratified. If you can't figure that out you ought to find work in a profession that suits your qualifications.
I hear Appleby's needs dishwashers.
Since toruture doesn't really mean torture anymore, here's Torture's new definition : The mental pain inflicted on someone after having read the New York Times.
Question:
Do para-military contractors use waterboarding on dissenting
Iraqi's?
When is this technique likely to be used on what Bush decides
are "domestic terrorists"?
If the White House believes this is a proceedure that produces
reliable results, then why don't we use lie detector results in
our courts?
Excellent questions, especially about the contractors.
Of course the Bush Administration and their crew want to bring back the good old days when police could beat confessions out of prisoners. They think the whole legal system went to hell with Miranda.
Rights for anyone but Rich White people? Absurd!
Why do the Republicans and conservatives in general always lambaste the NYT's for being so far to the left? Damn near everything they publish is in lockstep with what the Republicans and conservatives feel things are supposed to be. They supported and helped persuade their readers that invading Iraq was correct, and constantly implied that there was a direct connection between Saddam and Osama...al
I've always found this attitude towards the Times to be rather "twisted" logic. (And no pun intended.)
Resident Chimp,
The Mississippi Supreme Court called the 'water cure' torture. No qualifiers. See Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926).
The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment is directly jusdiciable in many jurisdictions around the world, especially in asylum cases because of Article 3, which bans refouling people to places where torture will take place: waterboarding and its variations in technique and name (such as 'chiffon') is clearly banned in all the decided international caselaw law (and in similar caselaw under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) and also in the domestic law in all countries where the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is applicable. There is little argument outside of the USA that your government has gone 'beyond the pale' on torture.
Yes, the "water cure" may cure someone of the act of breathing and induce heart failure and death.
I love my Country but, feel ashamed of where cheney and the chimp has taken us. We the American People should also be ashemed for leting it happen. are We no longer a Government of the People, for the People or are We lost forever?
Clubgitmo: Yes, people have died of waterboarding. Our enemies have been prosecuted for doing it, too, by us, in the past. And it has nothing to do with 9/11. Torturing people will not prevent another 9/11 because info obtained through torture is totally unreliable, for obvious reasons (you'll tell the torturer anything they want to hear, to make them stop). There's no good reason to torture, neither practical nor ethical. Do you care about either, or do you just like the idea of having total power over suspects?
George Bush is making a terrible mistake here. He is negating everything that America that America has come to stand for over the last 200 years. The Statue of Liberty is not holding up that torch for nothing! Bush is running the risk of being remembered as the Christian Torture President! This is really sad.
In 2004, CBS reported that over 30 prisoners had died in US captivity. Now that's torture!!
Note that the Canadians can't prosecute some of their terrorists because the US tortured them and the evidence is therefore inadmissible.
Yes, the criminals are still using the argument "no attacks in seven years" trying to show that they are the ones that are going to keep us safe. Fact is that the 9/11 attacks took over seven years of planning and logistics, and that was not including the implementation of the plan which included sending the participants to pilot schools.
Another fact is that the policies and actions of this administration have done more to bolster terrorism than the policies and actions of any administration in the past. Eventually there will be another attack, and when it happens, this lot (and the fools who support them) will put the blame everywhere except where it belongs--on themselves.
During the late Sixties and early Seventies I used to teach H. D. Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedien
Again, I live in such an America. The NYT lost me in how it depicted the runup to the Iraq War. I'd question less news I would read in Al Jazeera English than I would what I read in this no-longer paper of record, the New York Times. That some of us still have sense and sensibility is one thing. That we as Americans do something about what our nation has become is something different. What are you personally doing about what is happening?
Right on the money! Time for Critical Thinking to make a comeback in this country of consumer zombies!
Where is the loud outcry from the UN on this? I thought we were signatories on various resolutions banning this type of treatment for prisoners of war?
Oh, I forgot. We bought the UN already.
But failed to pay for it !!
With Cooper, it's always a conservative or Republican who emerges as the voice of reason and decency. Maybe if Cooper had not rolled over for McCain and Lindsey Graham with there all talk and no show stances against torture it would not have come to this. As for bad reporting in the Times,
this should be big news only to Cooper, who loves Jeff Gerth on The Clintons.
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Posted March 9, 2008 | 07:09 PM (EST)