'You the man, Glenn Greenwald, you the man."

Didn't Tony Blair teach Religion at Yale a couple of years ago?

if you want to be considered the "good guys", you don't act like the bad guys.

And save your crap about the US for the civilians of Dresden, Tokyo, and Hiroshima or the 400 dead lying in ditches at My Lai. As you can read from my post, I think Islamic fundamentalists in general, and Jihadis in particular, are immoral nutjobs and deserve to be punished to the full extent of our law for any and all breeches of the peace. If they commit terrorist acts, they must pay. But you don't flush whatever morlaity and legality you've built up over the centuries down the toilet in order to do that. To quote some of your friends, that would mean the terrorists win.

One might want to avail themselves of the read other letters option.

Matthew Alexander would no doubt disagree with your interlocutor, but I wouldn't recommend expending the effort to point that out.

Unless, you like merry-go-rounds, and thread litter...

Glenn, isn't it a fair point that Alicia is an ombudsman, not a decision-maker? She is tasked with annunciating the corporate line, giving listeners a contact-point through which to voice and aggregate their concerns, and passing those concerns along to management. Does she really need to be grilled on this issue in real time, or to say "yes, you're right," if she has no authority to effect changes?

Those who want to locate webcasts of NPR programs should visit the invaluable PublicRadioFan.com for schedules crosslisted hour-by-hour, program-by-program, station-by-station worldwide.

For TOTN in particular, you can go straight to:

http://publicradiofan.com/cgibin/program.pl?programid=16

No reason to put all the pressure arising from this controversy on a single station's web service.

"The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiations of the Convention [Against Torture]. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today." - Ronald Reagan

The Convention, which is binding as United States law, makes it a serious crime to "attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture..."

The "real world" can be a bitch sometimes.

But I'd bet a fortune that if Bush were a democrat, we'd all know how torture is defined, there would be no ambiguity, and he and his administration would be held to account. How do you square that with the "reportorial" stenographers?

Glenn, isn't it a fair point that Alicia is an ombudsman, not a decision-maker? She is tasked with annunciating the corporate line, giving listeners a contact-point through which to voice and aggregate their concerns, and passing those concerns along to management. Does she really need to be grilled on this issue in real time, or to say "yes, you're right," if she has no authority to effect changes?

What you described is exactly what an Ombudsman is not supposed to do: "tasked with annunciating the corporate line." She's supposed to be an internal critic of the media organization's practices, there to criticize it when merited, and voice listener objections. She's doing the opposite: she's acting as prime defender for NPR.

That's her right -- just as it's mine to criticize her views. But given the role she's playing -- being held out as the objective expert defending what NPR's doing -- I obviously think it's important to refute it and hold her accountable for what she's arguing. Why should be exempt from that?

Like it or not, the torture debate often is semantic, like so much of public controversy. "Torture" sweeps very widely, and even if slapping somebody around is "torture", so are the horrible practices we've heard about in lurid accounts of medieval times, the Inquisition, Asia in modern times, and so on. If people don't want to give debaters leverage by using "torture" to cover all physical discomfort that is understandable, in my opinion. "Torture" can be as useful as "bad" at times, and this is both the fault of the Bush administration and their critics, who use "torture" for polemic effect. So much of the criticism boils down to "that's torture", as an argument ender, just like "racism" is used to shut down opponents. Of course people who are arguing or trying to change policy are not exactly committed to truthful discourse at times.

"Of course its torture and both sides do it - why do you think someone coined the term 'War is Hell.'"

My teenagers tell me, "All my friends get to stay out as late as they want to. So I should too."

To which I reply, "It doesn't matter what your friends do, you need to be home by 11:00PM."

People who have matured beyond adolescence do not make the argument, "But everybody does it," to justify wrongdoing. And when they do, it's a dead give-away that they have a case of arrested moral development.

Let me get this straight. Government funded radio does not use the word torture when the government paying for its existence does it? This is surprising? And here I thought only corporate owned evil media was beholden to power.

In all seriousness, looks like the only good model for funding good journalism is through Paypal directly to the journalists that deserve it.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/letters-torture-style-and-merkin/

May 2, 2009

Re “Telling the Brutal Truth” (April 26):

As a former Army interrogator (1986-97) and the author of “The Statement on Interrogation Practices” submitted to the members of the Committees on the Armed Forces in July 2006, I am quite interested in this topic.

As a former interrogator and SERE trainer, I fully support the switch from “harsh” to “brutal” in describing the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. I also supported the migration from “simulated drowning” to “near drowning” when describing waterboarding.

But I would like to suggest that even “near drowning” doesn’t really describe the reason why waterboarding is torture. I offer for your consideration the following short description of why waterboarding is undeniably torture:

It’s not the physical discomfort of being strapped down and having water pour on you that makes waterboarding torture. It’s not the “simulation” of drowning that makes waterboarding torture. It’s the threat of imminent death — that’s what makes waterboarding torture. [...]

●

●

Waterboarding is torture. Beating a prisoner is torture.

Call it what it is: torture.

Call it what you would call it if it were done to you: torture.

[...] The New York Times can report the truth, or it can let itself be co-opted by fear and self-interest, like so many other institutions afraid to stand up for what is right.

●

●

I must quibble with the quibbling about “torture.”

The meaning of a word, as Wittgenstein reminded us, is its use. Specialized meanings, like those developed in the legal profession, are properly subsidiary to common-sense meanings.

Whether or not waterboarding is “torture” as (re-)defined in arcane legal parsings is irrelevant to its obvious status as torture in ordinary usage.

Lawyers and lawmakers do not own the language and do not have a privileged corner on meaning. It is entirely inappropriate for the Fourth Estate, whose practice depends utterly on ordinary uses and understandings of words, to succumb to such legalistic maneuvering.

Torture is torture by any other name.

●

●

You merely provide a fig leaf for the self-serving rationales of Times writers and editors.

There is no valid debate over whether or not these nefarious methods, especially waterboarding, are in fact torture.

●

●

Douglas Jehl, the deputy editor in the Washington Bureau, says: “This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?”

A couple of questions: Replace “torture” with “murder” or “embezzlement.” Are the plain meanings of everyday words upended and brought into doubt when an American president decides he would like to change them to suit his purposes?

Had the government that ordered torture been Chinese or Burmese, would Times editors be in such doubt?

●

●

But this is not an “on the one hand, on the other hand” issue. Torture is defined in treaties and United States laws that are legal standards for behavior by our and many other countries’ citizens.

As you note yourself, the United States has convicted people for war crimes who waterboarded our soldiers. So why do you continue to play — and more important, excuse Times editors for playing — semantic games?

●

●

Let readers debate whether torture is, under the parameters of some academic exercise, moral, permissible or pragmatic. But don’t let them blink at the fact that what they are discussing is torture. Believe me, some will still not flinch.

I know a man who has said that it’s a shame we didn’t do to our captives what “they” did to Daniel Pearl. Clearly this family man would have no qualms about recommending torture, even unto death, no matter how brutally honest the terms you employ.

●

●

On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?”

I would recommend the United States State Department, which has referred to sleep deprivation and waterboarding as torture.

This is a complete and embarrassing abdication of the newspaper’s responsibility to look at competing and contradictory assertions by public figures and determine the truth.

●

●

If you examine State Department Human Rights Reports (available yearly, for every country in the world, at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/), you will find that every practice detailed in the four memos released earlier this month is described by the United States government as torture when used in other countries. Every one.

There is no debate about whether these practices are torture when they happen outside of United States custody. Why should The Times hesitate to call these practices “torture” when they occur within American custody?

●

●

What a great victory The Times has given the Bush administration and its legion of apologists by even inviting such a debate.

●

●

__________