It gives me heart to see the bubble at NPR being pricked; can one hope for "burst"?

NPR is a brand, and it depends for its leverage in the national conversation on that brand name standing for judiciousness--for "considering all things." It isn't judicious (since it runs from judgment), it doesn't consider all things (see below).

I’m not a political radical myself, and supported NPR for many years, but the scales fell from my eyes after 9.11, when it became apparent that NPR had jettisoned the watch-dog concept of journalism for the view that journalism was an arm of government (though preferentially a Republican government, I would say): by which I mean, it might show show independence from government, but usually only when it cost nothing to do so.

Back to the torture issue. I want to throw into the mix part of a letter I wrote to Scott Simon on April 18 of this year, I guess in order to bear witness to one more item in the catalogue of dissatisfaction with NPR (I posted a shorter version of the letter on the npr.org site for that day’s Week in Review section). Scott Simon seems to me to embody the ethos of the NPR brand: someone with an aura of watchfulness and ethical probity that in reality provides cover for a failure of moral nerve, a kind of capitulation to the New Normal in journalism. For similar reasons, I’m glad you mentioned Jim Lehrer, to whom I also wrote about his failure to carry out a forensic journalism over everything to do with the obscenity of the Iraq war. These men have reputations; on the evidence I've seen, they do not deserve them.

So here is the part of the letter to Scott Simon I think relevant to the present discussion (I did not receive a response):

“Your handling this morning of the release of the four just-published torture memos was extremely disappointing.

It isn’t clear to me what would stop you from referring to the methods described in the memoss [sic, unfortunately] as torture, rather than as “harsh.”

And it is depressing that a prepared journalist would have nothing to say in response to Clive Cook’s comment that prosecution would be demoralizing for the CIA.

Wouldn’t that prepared journalist have firmly in mind that prosecution for torture is obligatory by international and US law? An even better prepared journalist would surely know further that one of the most distinctive legacies of the Nuremberg trials was that the defence that one was behaving according to or in obedience to the law in carrying out torture must not be used as a reason against prosecution for torture. In this case, the basis for such an appeal is much weaker: the torturers had behind them only legal opinions, even if DoJ opinions, and no one was coercing them.

It’s my impression that before 9-11, all “right-thinking” people cited Nuremberg as a kind of gold-standard, something the Allies could be proud of for its tackling of hard issues and for defining higher ethical standards for the post-war world. Since 9-11, one of its most basic planks, exactly something that was formerly a point of pride for the western democracies, has just disappeared from decent conversation: namely, the idea that torture is impermissible and that it is legally binding on all signatories to prosecute it.

….

Immediately after your conversation, you went to Admiral Mullen, who said of piracy [off the Somali coast], “It’s a crime, and should be prosecuted.” I wonder if you made the connection to the torture you had just been talking about (without calling it that), and whether it occurred to you that you might have put the question to Clive Cook: “Isn’t torture a crime, and isn’t the US obliged by its international treaties and its own law to prosecute it?”

….

It continues to be deeply disenchanting to hear voices that one used to think of as more ethically alert, so at home in a sanitized moral universe. I have no doubt you’re a good man, but that’s what is disturbing, the downward defining of what that means, so that it means things like being well-meaning, wouldn’t hurt my neighbor, etc., but also being unexercised by my government’s practice of torture, or indifferent to laws that had defined our moral landscape at the national and international level. So that I barely notice if someone says that it would hurt CIA morale to be bound by the law and go through a thorough investigation of the torture regime it housed. Meaning well is just not enough.

Respectfully,

Francis Ingledew.”

Keep on being one of few who insists on matching words to things, a.k.a. calling a spade a spade, torture torture, and so on. Thanks for the work you do that I don’t,

Francis

Reason - n. a logical method allowing one to successfully argue that A is B, B is C, and so forth. Reason allows one to proceed in such a fashion until all the letters of the alphabet have been exhausted, whereupon one may logically conclude that the alphabet consists of but a single letter. This makes spelling much less tricky. (Devil's Dictionary Defiled)

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According to this idea, NPR can call torture any thing they want to since all words consist of just the one letter, even if in its 26 forms. So, torture == hugs&kisses as far as they are concerned.

Glad to clear that misunderstanding up for those of you who are not up on the latest trends in the English language.

"Girlish", "boyish" or "mannish", I merely found her to be asexually sycophantic.

After all, people who can be described individually in any of the above manners, can be found to possess enthusiasm for sucking on "manly accoutrements".

Who are you talking about? He, She, or It sounds, well, er, interesting. I might want to look her up while I'm batching it this weekend.

Does He, She, or It sprechten español?

Love,

Mark S.