Walling, too, is torture.

Often I agree with you, but I think you're wrong in using the term "we" in relation to the acts of specific governments or the term United States.

Basically, the citizens of the US live in a plutocracy. The actions of the US are the responsibility of the team of the wealthy and the power elite that makes the decisions to do what they want to do.

As voters, our choices are empty. Go ahead. Pick a Democrat. Pick a Republican. You don't like either one? Go ahead. Pick a Democrat. Pick a Republican.

Of course, these two parties are not totally identical, but the last six months have actually shown that they share a lot of the same values, especially regarding the economic welfare of the wealthy.

No one needs a court or a judge to determine whether waterboarding is "torture." It is clearly torture.

Only people who have gone to law school, and not all of them, would not be able to understand this in an instant. This arrogance, the idea that the people need a court to tell them when torture occurs, seems to be a frequent product of a law school education, or perhaps it's a quality of the people who decide to go to law school in the first place?

I think the Times is simply trying to keep a journalistic foot in the door of the torturers in order to keep its connections to the sources of power. It is horrible to contemplate that employees of the Times do not understand that waterboarding is torture.

"Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed..."

Actually the International Committee of the Red Cross called it "torture" in that report. And the ICRC is the independent authority charged with supervising detainees to make sure they are not being tortured, so its label "torture" should rank higher in the media than the government's label.

I wonder what all these objective journalists who use tortured logic to not use the word "torture" think of Mr. Walter Cronkite who famously came out against the Vietnam war? Is he a disgrace as a journalist because he lost his objectivity? I wonder if he's held up as an object of scorn and ridicule in journalism classes.

Hey, thanks. I'm still giving it away because I haven't figured out how to get Salon to pay me.

Until I do, I've decided to give up the tedious explanations and just give out the answers. The rationalizations are best left to the student.

I'm very disappointed in Obama. Hilary might have been a better choice, although one suspects Bush's policies would have gotten a third term no matter who got elected.

"The US does not have a "news media". It has a Ministry of Propaganda."

Walter, happy to see that you are still plying your trade and doing it as well as ever.

marvel at what the NYT (and, of course, NPR) refuse to call "torture" when done by us.

Except when they do. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/us/politics/14yoo.html

Mr. Padilla was held as an “enemy combatant” in solitary confinement for more than three years in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Padilla, who was convicted of supporting terrorism and other crimes, demands that Mr. Yoo be held accountable for actions that Mr. Padilla claims led to his being tortured.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/weekinreview/19shane.html

The hands-on nature of torture lends it particular power, said Andrea Northwood, a psychologist who has treated hundreds of people at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. Even when the victim is a figure like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 plotter, torture carries a vicarious chill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html

The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.

Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture.

Techniques which the paper refuses to call "torture" when used by the U.S. magically transform when used by others

Which suggests that if others would simply parrot Obama's rationalizations they would immediately gain respectability and enhanced standing among all other nations.

Imagine what a different world it would be if every country operated the way the US does. No one would complain because no one would be left to either complain or hear the complaint. Problems with the economy, the environment, overpopulation, social injustice would all simply disappear.

Problem solved.

The US does not have a "news media". It has a Ministry of Propaganda.

Yes, spot on.

Look at the fellows here at UT that are all for war as long as "their side" is running the show. It is "humanitarian" for Democrats to bomb wedding parties.(*)

It will take a major sea change to stop the killing, rape, torture, and so forth. What can any individual do? That, my friend, is a major question. Each must do what she/he can to wake the populace out of their comfortable slumber and see the evil that is being done in the name of "spreading democracy" or "keeping America safe" or whatever the latest is.

As you may know, there is a group here who have always been more interested in petty name-calling than in the morality of interventions. I suspect it is the same most places. What are you going to do? It is what it is.

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(*) baby showers I could at least partially understand having been at one last week.

I think you took my mathematical projections too literally. All I am saying is that, without the support of the citizenry your efforts and the efforts of your cohorts are fruitless.

There were many more people involved in the protests against the Iraq War. I was there at every protest I could go to. Traveling quite a long distance some times.

I learned that the methods now used for crowd control are extremely effective.

I learned that the M$M wasn't going to publicize the protests.

I learned that Americans were "cognitively dissident," and could care less about their government using its military power to wield a big stick in this world.

I learned that if the citizenry cares more about tabloid magazines and gossip than torture and government secrecy and that nothing, in my opinion, can be done.

It's like shoveling shit against the tide.