Mainstream Media Propaganda

Published on

Friday, August 08, 2014

by

Common Dreams

NYT Drops Government-Preferred Euphemisms and Will Now Call Torture "Torture"

Newspaper's executive Dean Baquet said change in policy comes after urging from newsroom reporters and says terminology not quite so "murky" as it once appeared to them

by

Jon Queally, staff writer

'Torture' is 'torture' at the venerable New York Times... finally. (Photo: flickr / cc / Scott Beale)

In an announcement on Thursday, the New York Times' executive editor Dean Baquet said the widely-read newspaper—at the urging of reporters in the newsroom—will end its  long-held and widely criticized practice of calling torture  by the U.S. government "enhanced interogation techniques" and instead call it by its "common" name: torture.

In his statement posted on the paper's website, Baquet said:

Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.

When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods.

But as we have covered the recent fight over the Senate report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation program – which is expected to be the most definitive accounting of the program to date – reporters and editors have revisited the issue. Over time, the landscape has shifted. Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A. inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people’s bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation.

Strikingly, it was the Times itself which reported that the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed '183 times' in 2009, as it credited national security blogger Marcy Wheeler who noticed the shocking detail in a 2005 Bush administration memo.

Saying "the landscape has shifted" in recent months, Baquet said the Times' reporters will "recalibrate their languge" by using "the word 'torture' to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information."

Welcoming the decision, but calling Baquet's reasoning "troubling," Paul Waldman at theAmerican Prospect responded:

First, the part about learning the extent of the torture is absolutely irrelevant to what you call it. The implication is that if a prisoner had been waterboarded 10 times, then you might not call it torture, but since it was 183 times, you would. That's plainly absurd.

But more importantly, when Baquet says the Times "avoided a label that was still in dispute," what he's saying is that the paper essentially outsourced its judgment on what is and isn't torture to the Bush administration. All that was required to put the matter "in dispute" was for the administration to declare, beyond all reason and common sense, that things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions aren't torture, and the Times threw up its hands and said: "Well, we can't call that torture anymore, because now that's in dispute." So, presumably, if tomorrow the Obama administration decided to refer to Republicans as "the Hater party," the Times would no longer use the term "Republican" in its pages, because now that's "in dispute."

Other critics of the paper were caught between expressing dismay that it has taken such a long time to finally drop the use of government-preferred euphemisms and actually congratulating Baquet for simply making the right decision, despite the late date.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/08/08/nyt-drops-government-preferred-euphemisms-and-will-now-call-torture-torture