Last week I replied to a post on the Atlanta CL with a note about the BBC documentary by Alan Curtis, "The Power of Nightmares," urging him to see it. The post got flagged and deleted within minutes. Interesting thing about CL is that it is heavily trolled by cops.

Last week I replied to a post in the Atlanta CL with a note about the BBC documentary by Alan Curtis called "The Power of Nightmares" and urged him/her to see it. The post got flagged and deleted within minutes. Interesting thing about CL is that it is heavily trolled by cops... okay, okay, all manner of deviants.

They decry torture ... except when they commit it.

They condemn moral relativism ... except when they engage in it.

They extol adversarial journalism ... but only when focused on certain adversaries.

They insist on the need for a vibrant free press ... yet they refuse to provide one.

You mentioned that the "Power of Nightmares" caused the cops to come out and quickly delete your email.

My hunch is that it is a piece of software that goes through the postings and when they see certain items, automatically flags them and it may pass it to humans, but the comment is deleted.

It happened to my son on commondreams.org

His posting was not only deleted, he was banned from the site for including a link

to the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The initial reports and news stories put the blame for the mayhem squarely on Daly's cops (where it largely rested). But the news editors at the networks (remember the Big Three) and the big city papers discovered within 24 hours that millions of Americans were thrilled by the spectacle of the cops enforcing "law and order" on the longhairs, and they immediately started backtracking and hunting for neutral or euphamistic ways of describing what happened thereby exonerating the cops. The "media elite" suddenly realized that they were out of synch with their audience (or a huge hunk of it), and they were determined that they would never make such a mistake again.

They rarely have since.

Interestingly, the less, and more deceptive, information we get from the media about these things, the more this schoolmarmish squeamishness over words and deafening silences that border on collusion about government corruption and abuse has itself become the news. Journalists everywhere seem to be spending all their time, as though on Oprah, explaining themselves, again and again, blame-shifting and whining instead of doing their purported jobs. It makes sense, I suppose, given shrinking news holes and withering revenues, that they're engaged in pretty much full-time self-justification, if only hoping to please the suits long enough to get a good buyout offer. Beats working, but it's pretty tiresome for their long-suffering readers.

But look at the travel expenses saved when covering a jaw-dropping scandal is as easy as walking down the hall, and you can fire your research team, too, if all you do is talk about yourself.

Tomorrow's NYT awaits, for the bargain price of six bucks. Same as a six-pack. One of life's more obvious choices, I'd say.

if you can call it that. Still waiting for the entire report to be released without the redactions. The MSM won't use the word straight out because that would give creedance to the idea that we do torture, which I believe we are guilty of.

Who controls the news and talking heads? Find out who signs their paychecks. Edward R. Murrows they are not.

When I speak to others about the topic their eyes glaze over and they are not interested. A sorry state of affairs. Whatever lofty place our American Empire supposedly occupied is a lot lower than Most Americans realize.

Once you push the envelope to sanctify the crimes and lies commited by the Bush Administration in the name of the American people, we have set it up for the next push and an even more distorted push of the envelope. How far can we push it and still expect to have any supporters in the world but the depraved and evil?

The NPR debacle on the use of the word "Torture" is quickly dissapating any credibility NPR may have had with many informed, intelligent people. Can I get my pledge back?

We "The American People" have killed innocent people without trials or convictions. No doubt about it. We are becoming what we profess to fight against. At the Nuremburg Trials there would have been a whole lot of Americans in the docket. Sad. Stayed tuned for the future.

Google New York Times and torture and a number of examples pop up that prove that the word has been used routinely and emphatically to call torture what it is -- torture.

Michael Slackman wrote in the NYT's on 8/3/05:

"The Egyptian police fatally tortured 22 prisoners in 2004, a marked increase from the 8 prisoners reportedly tortured to death a year earlier, according to a report by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. ... Gasser Hussein Abdel Razek, the editor of the report, said the number of torture-related deaths might be even higher and was generally tolerated in cases involving Islamists. ''There has been a government policy of tolerance for police brutality,'' he said. ''The numbers will increase until there is a policy decision that torture won't be tolerated.'"

In this instance the Times had no trouble using the word torture in exactly the same context in which it prohibited Scott Shane from using it in an article about U.S. practices. Yet Clark Hoyt proceeds to defend this double standard. The NYT's did not wait for a legal proceeding to render a verdict in this case, Hoyt's miserable excuse in defending the Times censorship in Shane's piece. Hoyt's defense of the Times' refusal to call torture by the U.S. what it is, even when referring to others' allegations, is weak and dishonest.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

”The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master - that’s all.”