The NYT And The T-Word

The front-page piece in the NYT today on Obama's thorny task in staffing the CIA, after seven years of its violation of the Geneva Conventions, is revealing in many ways. Like many in the MSM, the NYT cannot bring itself to describe the techniques that the CIA has used as "torture." And yet we know that the CIA has tortured prisoners under the plain legal definition of torture, and we know that this was the whole point of giving the CIA explicit legislative permission for this in 2006. No doubt some of the techniques only rise to the level of abuse and not the "severe" mental or physical pain and suffering standard for torture. But we know that many go and have consistently gone beyond this under Bush and Cheney - and that that line was deliberately blurred or rendered meaningless by a hired gun like John Yoo. The reason many of us opposed John Brennan was because of his documented ambivalence about exactly this: the use of abuse and torture as weapons in interrogation and his enmeshment with George Tenet when Tenet authorized war crimes. The NYT, however, did not cite the actual reasons we opposed him or the quotes that disturbed us, and explains it as a function of "the left". The piece also allows Brennan to characterize himself as an opponent of abuse and torture, when the record clearly shows something much more ambiguous.

In fact, the only time the word "torture" is used in the NYT piece is to describe techniques practised by other countries. This is an important point because it shows how the NYT is now actively deceiving its readers about this matter. Here is the NYT's locution on waterboarding, a torture technique used for centuries:

the near-drowning tactic considered by many legal authorities to be torture.

Can the NYT cite one legal authority (John Yoo does not count) that says waterboarding is not torture?

Can they cite one instance in American legal history in which is was not so defined? If not, why this absurd avoidance of the truth in the paper of record? For one instance - in Mississsippi in 1926 - check this case out. If a Southern court in the 1920s took it as a given that waterboarding was torture, why is it in dispute in 2008? As for all those lefties, the NYT itself notes:

On Wednesday, a dozen retired generals and admirals are to meet with senior Obama advisers to urge him to stand firm against any deviation from the military’s noncoercive interrogation rules...

This group will include Paul D. Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces for the Army in 2003 and 2004. Since when is that general or all his peers or the countless members of the CIA, military and FBI who were horrified by what Cheney and Bush did members of the Democratic party "left"?

This is the strategy of the torture defenders: render this debate once again a red-blue, right-left ding-dong, culture war struggle. It isn't. It's a foundational, moral and constitutional issue that transcends all those categories. And the NYT does its readers a disservice in occluding that.