but my fren barnbert tol me that she puts all here faith in the New Yawk Times becuase it is allways acurit.

i am now cornfuzed. is barnbert wrong for once?

p.s. i like u grenn but i no like u foir luver like adnomo and his gang. twogether they r not so gud as calamari and jonathanintelevision.

u jus gud writer!

Go to Democracy Now at www.democracynow.org for a talk by Noam Chomsky "CRISSES AND HOPE".

>>>The world is so sick and tired of the Arabs and Muslims whining about the injustice done to them.

Substitute "Jews" for "Arabs and Muslims" in the above sentence. How does it read now?

I'm so sick and tired of being sick and tired of racist claptrap.

Glenn: you use a broader landscape and I agree with your commentary. I made an entirely different point: the NYT reporter does not say that e.g Iranian prisoners are being tortured. In the "old days" they would have done so. Now this reporter is quoting either a former detainee or a group. They use the word torture.

OTOH: the NYT will not quote an American source who tells them that a detainee was tortured at Guantanamo. Instead weasel words will be the default choice: "allege"etc. I hope you get my drift.

7/4/09

Dear Glenn,

This whole series you are doing here is really good so thank you. By holding up the mirror for these people you bring them to the absurd extreme of their position. Finally, those who live by the sale words are frightened to use them honestly. How sad for them.

I fundamentally disagree with any suggestion that Americans support torture. We are all ashamed of our government for taking this course and dismayed that our press is complicit in these crimes. They hide behind their sanitized euphemisms and run away from an individual blogger who asks only that they say the "T" word out loud and declare their own condoning its use. They are cowards.

Thank you,

Conrad C. Elledge

Go back and look at the Slackman article again. He specifically breaks out the techniques that the NYT consistently refuses to call torture, lists them, and then appends torture as among the tactics used by the Iranians.

You should go back and read the NYT's excuse for not using "torture" to describe Bush tactics. It's not based on a distinction between various tactics; it's based on the claim that where there's no court ruling, it's not up to reporters to call it "torture":

But he said: "I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. 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?" Jehl argued for precision and caution.

They're not saying what you're saying they are. They're not claiming that where it leaves no scars, it's not clearly torture. They're saying that where there's a denial and no court has opined, they shouldn't judge.

It brings the media vocabulary into very stark relief: They refuse to call any psychological technique, or any of the deprivation techniques (sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, bright lights, noise, etc.,) or any of the degradation techniques (criticizing sexuality, causing people to urinate or defecate on themselves, threats of force or death) torture. The are completely reserving the term for techniques that explicitly leave scars or cause agonizing immediate pain.

How do you know this? They don't say this. What techniques did the Iranians use that the NYT is calling "torture"?

I find it interesting that Doug Jehl was the guy mentioned -- because I have experience with him, and understanding that gives insight into the current mess.

During the fight over the saving roadless areas on our National Forests, that resulted in the Clinton Roadless Initiative, Jehl was the lead reporter sent to Idaho. He had built up the issue in the classic 'loggers/millworkers vs. enviros' framework, with the idea that this was some battle of East Coast elites vs. the 'poor working people' of Idaho. Nothing was further than the truth.

Jehl called Orofino, ID, 'Ground Zero' in the battle, and came to report on a public hearing there. He wanted screaming timber workers, but what he got was a majority of folks that supported saving our roadless lands.

He didn't end up writing on that -- because it went against his cultural meme that he was trying to promote. Instead, he finally found some conflict that matched his prior perception of the story, and wrote about that. The venue was in (I believe) Nampa, a suburb of Boise, where Boise-Cascade had bussed in and organized workers. Instead of crusty lumberjacks, though, my friends that were there told me that many were Mexican, probably temporary workers.

Jehl, and others like him, serve to promote upper-middle-class memes of stories, rather than doing real reportage and challenging perceptions. It's no surprise that they're doing this with Iraq and torture, because we have to remember that the upper-middle-class, represented by the Senators, were for this war, simply because it seemed like the expedient thing to do at the time, it matched the story, and importantly, THEY do not have children in the military, by and large.

I don't think Jehl is unique. In fact, he's emblematic.

Go back and look at the Slackman article again. He specifically breaks out the techniques that the NYT consistently refuses to call torture, lists them, and then appends torture as among the tactics used by the Iranians.

It brings the media vocabulary into very stark relief: They refuse to call any psychological technique, or any of the deprivation techniques (sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, bright lights, noise, etc.,) or any of the degradation techniques (criticizing sexuality, causing people to urinate or defecate on themselves, threats of force or death) torture. The are completely reserving the term for techniques that explicitly leave scars or cause agonizing immediate pain.

What they are doing is using a distinction that is nearly instinctual (even people who constantly write about torture find themselves appending adjectives like "brutal" when "unclean" torture is used) and splitting out so-called "clean torture" and calling the label controversial on it. That is indeed a controversy that the Bush administration officials and others would like to grow. But it seems strange that as far back as the Albigensian Crusade, the Catholic Church would know that these techniques were indisputably torture and the 21st century NYT and NPR would say there was controversy.

They want these distinctions because many, many people who operate under color of law in the U.S., and not just those who tortured during the Bush administration's torture program, don't want that line blurred. That's how Doug Jehl can, with a straight face, claim there are no court decisions. There are plenty court decisions, but some of those that decide about individual tactics (they are never used individually so this is a false distinction) call some of the clean tactics CIDT.

Since the whole thrust of all the Bush administration's memoes was to attempt to do only CIDT on the (mistaken) grounds that it was legal if overseas and during war) these people, like Jehl, far from being neutral, are directly and fully supporting the Bush administration's legal viewpoint. Mostly because they refuse to submerge their instinctual and gut reactions and look at the facts, mostly not because they are in any way "objective".