Glenn, I'm not sure the quotes belong around "torture". I think they belong around "controversy".

Here are the facts: NPR has covered this story time and again. They have covered Salon's prisoner abuse reporting. They've reported on the CIA prisons and abuse at Guantanamo. They've reported on US citizens being picked up and exported for harsh interrogation in countries where torture is not illegal.

That is entirely different from Faux News continuing to insist that our brave men and women could tell the difference between bad guys and good guys in the heat of battle, only the bad guys were imprisoned, their treatment in prison is more comfortable than their lives at home, and we still need to keep interrogating them in order to find the WMD that do exist.

So Glenn, why NPR? Is it because it is the publicly-funded, not-for-profit, national news organization that still bases reporters on location around the world instead of depending on wire services? Is that what you want to get them to stop? Or do you want to get them to concede what will be a political point unless other news organizations also concede it? Do you seriously want to give the right ammunition for further cuts to NPR funding because of their leftist bent?

If you're going to take it on across the board, why don't you keep a running list of all the ombudsmen who've refused to talk to you? I expect the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Fox News to figure prominently.

I would never even aspire to such heights. The master, Amity, employs the art of parody and satire as it is meant to be done. (As a bit of an aside, I also find Little Brother to be a noteworthy exemplar of this art.)

I just get angry and cynical - sometimes, to keep myself from being rude, I try to temper my comments with a little snarky humor. But it pales in comparison to the elegant art of the Masters. (But thanks!)

Us DFHs don't know nothing about brooms!

Too true. My own experience is restricted as much as possible to rakes and trowels. With brief encounters with my shovel and double-pronged weed-extractor thrown in for the sake of variety.

All of which are on the agenda for the upcoming weekend, which should render it "fine" indeed.

Similar wishes to you and yours and "much grass" for the compliment (as members of our "insufficiently border-challenged borrowed agricultural workforce program" might put it).

I've been reading Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics by Frederic Spotts, which looks in detail at Hitler's intense, even overriding, interest in the arts (key takeaway: beware of frustrated artists who are also nationalists).

Relevance here? The Nazi view of the proper role of political reporters turns out to be the same as the Washington establishment's.

Think this is an outrageous exaggeration? In the fall of 1936, the Reich was getting ready to make all art criticism illegal. Here's what Goebbels had to say about the policy in his diary:

Only reporting is permissible. Just as in politics. The stupid must not criticize the clever.

"The stupid must not criticize the clever." Now available as a slogan for any old media looking for a way to fresh their look.

Goebbel's decree, issued in November 1936, spelled out that "cultural criticism was henceforth to be replaced with straightforward reporting and positive evaluation[my emphasis]".

Exactly. "Just as in politics." None of this depressing, negative "torture" nonsense allowed.

The only difference I can discern between Hitler's parameters for acceptable reporting and the approved methods of the beltway is that, unlike WaPo, the Nazis were above selling lobbyists access to administration officials and reporters.

superconvergent transmigration of souls

Well done. I believe you have just trumped both macgupta and myself.

I argued for that terminology almost 6 months ago:

May I suggest that we call the Woodward wannabes like Ambinder and Lizza "access whores"? And we can call what they do prostitution. After all, it is difficult to deliver the literal versions of the services our Fourth Estate friends give metaphorically without access either.

But even I never imagined that they would be that blatant in their quest to become the Mustang Ranch of journalism.

Because I was pretty sure it was "multi-tongued authority-fellators".....

I could be wrong though.

@ Clockwork Smurf:

"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."

To which I can only ask, is it erroneous to call the Third Reich's Final Solution a program of mass murder because many Jews, Russians, gypsies and homosexuals were merely imprisoned, starved, and used as slave labor, but not to the point of death?

Clearly, a program which employs some techniques that fall indisputably under the legal definition of torture, and many others that even a Clockwork Smurf would call torture if they were employed on him or his loved ones, can and should be called a torture program. Any other terminology is simple semantic quibbling.

The Presidential E.O. of Jan. 22nd made it quite clear:

(a) Common Article 3 Standards as a Minimum Baseline. Consistent with the requirements of the Federal torture statute, 18 U.S.C. 2340 2340A, section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, 42 U.S.C. 2000dd, the Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3, and other laws regulating the treatment and interrogation of individuals detained in any armed conflict, such persons shall in all circumstances be treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person (including murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and t o r t u r e ), nor to outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment), whenever such individuals are in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States.

(Also, res ipsa loquitur, or in this case, Alicia is just being petty, silly and, stubbornly, girlish...not 'pedantic' at all.) The encumbrance she demands is also called censorship and I resent it. But that's arch pettiness for you.

Further insults will follow, I'm sure, as if to devastate your argumentation as "brutish," "rude" and "poorly intentioned." THAT would be pedantry.