Shepard has made many ridiculous statements as she has tried to keep her mind closed and justify the role of a journalist which she unfortunately is teaching to students who want to be journalists. She clearly is not a journalist and does not understand the most fundamental part of a journalist's job. Put simply, a journalist has a desire to improve people's lives, is curious and wants to find out things that others don't know about and then tell enough people so that something will be done to right a wrong or fix something that is broken.

Somehow supposed practitioners of this craft decided to divide the job into investigative journalism and stenography and haven't even realized they made the division. The other incredible fallacy they convinced themselves of to perform their stenographer role is that they can be totally objective and not take sides. They foolishly believe that all of their life experience and cultural learning can be set aside when they perform their job. The only reporter that is capable of doing that is an audio or video recorder. Deborah Tanen's statement, provide by emaydon says it all, “The search for words that are not in any way evaluative is hopeless,” she told me. “All words have connotations.”

Every decision a journalist makes is evaluative with connotations. Deciding: what story to cover; who to talk to and who not to talk to; what should and should not be researched; what should be recorded or remembered or not; what question should be asked or not; what information needs to be followed up or not; etc. All gathered information has to be evaluated and decisions made on what the reader/listener/viewer will ultimately be told and how they will be told it.

Again emaydon gave us an insightful Halperin quote, "We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that."

If Shepard understood her job as either a journalist or an ombudsman, she would never have made her outlandish statements or refused to be interviewed by Glenn. Instead, she would be outraged about how national and international law on torture has been broken, thousands of innocent people have been tortured and over a hundred killed and our government sought illegally to find a way to justify breaking the law then use propaganda to fool the American people into believing that what was done was right and justified. She would have been seeking the truth as she interpreted the truth. She would provide all the needed background and facts to understand what needed to be done to prevent such an outrage from ever happening again.

That is fundamentally what Shepard doesn't understand. Her listeners want her to interpret for them what actually is happening to them and what their government is doing in their name and how much damage that will do to them. If we had journalists instead of stenographers, there is no reason that something as stupid and tragic as the Iraq invasion could not have been prevented.

A real journalist must recognize their prejudices and weaknesses and fully understand that they are an interpreter of the truth and what they do is extremely important to the fate of their nation and even the world. It is an enormous challenge to be a real journalist. That may be the reason that the weak and vain stenographers rewrote their job because it is far easier and more lucrative.

We have prosecuted water boarding in the past, and when discussing waterboarding it is fair to use the term torture.

What we haven't prosecuted, are other aspects, such as lying to prisoners about their status (there is a poisonous spider in your room, when there isn't) or monitored stress positions, and I don't think anyone (with the exception of low level soldiers at) have ben prosecuted for putting women's underware on someone's head.

This is the problem, use of the word torture, which is correct in the case of water boarding is far more open to debate when you move down the list of techniques.

To call the entire program a torture program is erroneous, because many of the issues, though draconian, and perhaps even illegal on other grounds, aren't torture. The program was enhanced interogation, and some of the techniques used can be described as torture, is accurate, and the calling of waterboard is certainly accurate, and if NPR is not using this term with regard to that specific technique they are wrong, however since most discussions of the program are abotu the program as a whole and not a specific incident it is erroneous to call it a torture program.

Since enhanced interogation covered areas as benign as isolation, and as harsh at water torture, is it appropriate to discuss the program as a whole using the term enhanced interogation and the individual techniques as torture when warranted.

I personally think the term waterboarding is itself a euphemism. As was water cure, and most other names for it, except one: water torture. Jeff Kaye has been doing a yeoman's work over at FDL on the techniques that are not getting mention (some of which are considered in the memoes to be preparatory), especially sleep deprivation, which is performed, according to Yoo and Bradbury's memoes, by shackling the prisoner to the ceiling and floor unless the person cannot stand, in which case the prisoner is shackled lying down with arms and legs outstretched and above the body. In other words, the method of keeping someone awake is essentially that if they fall asleep it becomes strappado. The latter may or may not be torture in Ms. Shepard's considered opinion. The Catholic Church thought it was, but maybe their definitions are quaint or lacked journalistic nuance.

http://firedoglake.com/2009/05/11/torture-whats-in-a-name-it-was-never-just-sleep-deprivation/

The U.S. also used the immigration system to deal with prisoners arrested in the U.S. whom it didn't want to try, on these prisoners neuroleptics, specifically Haldol, were used in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling against use of them on prisoners. Jeff has something to say about the use of drugs for interrogation, because the use of drugs isn't banned by the Army Field Manual on interrogation, at least according to John Yoo.

http://firedoglake.com/2009/06/30/by-yoos-own-analysis-army-field-manual-allows-torture-by-drugs/

But then, unlike Alicia Shepard, Jeff might actually be permitted to use the word torture. After all, he doesn't have her 30 years of journalism experience. He just has experience treating torture victims, and participated in the Istanbul Protocol standard creation, so he has the disadvantage of knowing exactly what torture is, which terminally impairs his objectivity in the eyes of NPR.