Glenn Greenwald Calls Out NYT On "Torture" Hypocrisy

[Hissyspit]

http://mobile.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/03/09/journalism/index.html

WED, 09 MAR 2011 09:10:00 ET
NYT and "torture": Searching for a justification
The paper of record refuses to call waterboarding "torture" -- unless it's done by others
BY GLENN GREENWALD

- snip -

New York Times Washington Bureau Editor Douglas Jehl on why his paper refuses to describe Bush's waterboarding program as "torture":

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?

From a New York Times obituary today:

As a hero of the French Resistance, Stéphane Hessel was in exile with Charles de Gaulle in London, imprisoned in concentration camps, waterboarded in Nazi torture sessions and saved from hanging by swapping identities with an inmate who had died of typhus. . . . Asked how he survived torture, he said, "The third time of waterboarding, I said, 'Now, I’ll tell you.' And I told them a lie of course." He added: "One survives torture. So many people unfortunately have been tortured. But it's not a thing to recommend."

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[EFerrari]

1. No wonder the NYTs attacks Assange and Wikileaks. n/t

[gratuitous]

2. Hessel was a captive of the Nazis

So it had to be torture. Our star-spangled, freckle-faced, all-American fightin' men and women? We don't torture, silly. Besides, we need to have a court tell us what torture is. How can we decide what a fact is, when one side gives a self-serving excuse to avoid charges of crimes against humanity? It's just too, too hard for us to figure out!

[sabrina 1]

3. History will not be kind to these collaborators

It never is.

This country has always viewed water-boarding as torture. But hey, if he thinks it's not, then as someone pointed out this week, he won't object when it's done to U.S. soldiers who might be captured.

These people put the troops in such danger because they are so deeply indoctrinated into caring about only one thing, they care nothing for the troops or for the innocent children we are killing, or anything else.

They are our version of the Hitler propaganda machine, and don't anyone talk to me about Godwin's law, the man already explained what he meant by that anyhow.

When the signs are all there, responsible citizens point them out.

Douglas Jehl is a coward and nothing more than a propagandist. I hope no one ever subjects him to water-boarding. I have a feeling he would change his mind. Like Christopher Hitchens.

[DirkGently]

4. We are GUARANTEEING our soldiers will be waterboarded. And subject to the worse things we did.

There's a big something-or-three not being said in all of this, too, which is that waterboarding is the thing Bush / Cheney, et al admitted to. But the idea that we opened that door and stopped at Torture 1 is highly unlikely. I think it's the reason Obama did his 180 on releasing further pictures of the detainees.

Pandora's box doesn't open part way.

[Wilms]

5. k/r