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• Thursday, December 4, 2008 08:53 AM

  Scott Horton at Harper's

  http://harpers.org/archive/2008/12/hbc-90003956

  December 4, 7:46 AM, 2008
  The Gray Lady’s Torture Problem
  By Scott Horton

  On Wednesday, the New York Times had another psychotic episode. The paper’s editorial page has been an eloquent voice on the national stage regarding torture. But often enough the news it relies upon for its editorials never finds its way into its reporting.

  * * * * *

  This has been remarked before, and bears repeating. The NYTimes editorial writers, especially on issues of law and ethics, often show that they've learned things that were covered only in blogs and other obscure places, and that weren't covered in the news pages of the NYTimes.

  * * * * *

  Scott Horton continues:

  That’s the case with this piece by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane. The story could have grappled with the many subtle and complex policy issues that the incoming administration faces in implementing its no-torture pledge at the CIA. Instead, however, the authors treat us to what sounds suspiciously like an extended pouting session from the camp of John O. Brennan.

  Brennan and his friends obviously believe that rejecting him is a slap in the face to all veterans of the war on terror–an absurd proposition that the Times then proceeds to treat as indisputable fact.

  But the Times’s language is even more revealing. As Andrew Sullivan points out, the Times chokes and sputters and is unable to mouth the word “torture.”

  As I discovered in studying the paper’s reporting over a period of year, when a neighbor plays his stereo too loudly in the apartment next door, that is “torture.”

  But when a man is stripped of his clothing, chained to the floor in a short-shackle position, subjected to sleep deprivation and alternating cold and heat, and left to writhe in his own feces and urine—that, in the world of the Times, is just an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

  Shane and Mazzetti do us one better in this piece. Figures who criticize torture and Brennan’s fitness to be DCI are, we learn, the “left wing of the Democratic Party.”

  That’s a remarkable characterization for a group that is led by retired generals and admirals [...]

  - - Scott Horton at Harper's

  * * * * *

  See also Charles Kaiser at CJR.

  —sysprog Read sysprog's other letters
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