When Papers Quit Calling Waterboarding 'Torture'

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/the-legacy-media-and-torture.html

by talbina • 16 years ago

31 26 16 years ago

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

MaysonL4• 16 years ago

The scare quotes in the title seem somewhat editorial, and should probably be removed by moderator.

Also, a link to the original report on which the posted article is based: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/tort...

talbina• 16 years ago

No, it is not editorial, that is the title given on the front page. The practice by online news publications to have different headings is very common.

No, the original link serves a different purpose. Andrew Sullivan is not your average news aggregator, and his commentary on the subject brings in a lot of weight. In addition, there are links in his article which show his prior research in this area along with a piece by Salon. Thirdly, some people prefer a quick newspaper style summary rather than an abstract from a peer reviewed journal.

MaysonL4• 16 years ago

I wasn't criticizing the Sullivan post, merely adding the link to the original: Sullivan's blog links to a Google Docs copy of the Harvard study - which I found annoying: PDF's are much easier to handle than Google docs (IMO - YMMV)

philwelch4• 16 years ago

How so? They're not scare quotes, they're actual quotes. It's a grammatical convention in English to quote a word if you're talking about the word itself, as the headline does.

MaysonL4• 16 years ago

Actually, to call something torture is substantially different in connotation than to call something 'torture'. I think the Atlantic headline writer goofed.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

There's a reason for this, and it's cowardly and despicable, but it's not nearly so straightforward as the US press being lapdogs for US war criminals.

Newspapers have a journalistic duty to be impartial, or at least a marketing duty to appear impartial. (News outlets that seem partial lose prestige, and hence compete in a different niche--contrast the New York Times and the New York Post.) Who must they appear impartial to? Their audience, of course--and the primary audience for American newspapers is Americans. Now, when the American executive branch and one out of two political parties seriously claims that waterboarding is not torture, you suddenly seem partial to Americans if you openly contradict that claim, because the question of whether waterboarding is torture has moved from accepted wisdom to controversy. Clouding all of this, of course, is that the controversy itself is nothing more than a semantic argument. Another contributing factor is ignorance--waterboarding went from an obscure torture technique which comparatively few people knew about to an active political issue, which means a lot of people who knew absolutely nothing about waterboarding until the administration said "we're for it and we're doing it" made up their minds at that instant, based on their opinion of the administration.

Weaker forms of this are seen when, for instance, news outlets give equal time to cranks when reporting on science, because there's "controversy" over whether evolution is real or whether the earth is really 4 billion years old. It's easy to find more examples if you look out for them.

robin_reala• 16 years ago

See the Overton Window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Window

MaysonL4• 16 years ago

Newspapers have a journalistic duty to be impartial

Actually, they don't: journalism's duty is to be truthful, not impartial: if somebody lies, it's the journalist's duty to show that they're lying, not to do the he-said, she-said tango.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

Journalism's duty is to be truthful and impartial--truthful on matters of fact, impartial on matters of opinion. From there it gets complicated, of course.

Daniel_Newby3• 16 years ago

Why is this sophomoric garbage on HN? Seriously, we're supposed to believe that the New York Times is a craven tool of the neocon puppeteers, rather than liberals who got mugged by 2752 object lessons in the difference between random homicide and harsh interrogation?

crystalis3• 16 years ago

Why is this sophomoric comment on HN? Seriously, we're supposed to believe that hyperbolic assertions are considered a contribution to the discussion?

Daniel_Newby3• 16 years ago

Yes. The most parsimonious explanation for the NYT's war attitude is that the destruction of the twin towers recalibrated their ideas about justice and reasonable response.

This is in comparison to the data-free explanation of the article, that an unspecified conspiracy in the NYT sold out to an unspecified faction in the Bush 42 administration under unspecified pressure. It's not even a conspiracy theory. Rolling Stone and Drudge would require better sourcing to print such vacuous trollop. HN is a poor venue for politics, and an even poorer venue for empty political traffic-whoring.

mkramlich4• 16 years ago

Waterboarding is bad, of that there is no doubt. However, lots of things that society already accepts as being, in isolation, bad/evil, we already allow and accept and do not consider "evil" when done under special circumstances.

Take the case where someone is suddenly surrounded in the street, forced into a vehicle and taken away. That's normally called kidnapping. But if police do it, it's called an arrest. If a person is held against their will in a cold small cell and their movements and actions strictly limited, and treated like an animal or child most of us would consider that cruel and inhumane and label it as slavery. But if it is inside a "prison" and said person had violated a law and that is our justification for them being there then it is "okay" and not evil to be doing that to them.

And almost all societies have been doing this for thousands of years. Nothing new here. Move along.

But one day the issue of waterboarding comes up, as it relates to US treatment of some terrorists caught in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Is it unpleasant? You bet. Extremely? No doubt. But is the US government just showing up outside John & Jane Smith's house in Iowa, kidnapping the wife, a perfectly innocent suburban house mom, taking her away to a secret location and then waterboarding her in order to make her reveal her secret cookie recipe? Heck no. That's not what was happening. Far from it, according to the published reports. Instead, the US government used this technique only on "bad guys" -- and by that term I mean folks for whom there was enough evidence that any reasonable person would agree that he had been engaged in evil & illegal acts such is killing or planning to kill innocent US non-combatant civilians. Such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planning mastermind behind the 9/11 operation. Am I going to lose any sleep at all over him being waterboarded IF the goal was getting useful information out of him to further fight/dismantle Al Qaeda and prevent future murders? Heck no. Do I think it is wrong for him to be waterboarded? I'm not sure. At best it's in some shades of grey area. I think kidnapping is wrong, I think slavery is wrong and I think murder is wrong but every single day in this country and in many countries around the world citizens already give their governments a free pass at doing exactly these things. And we as citizens allow it (assuming democracies, people have ultimate control over laws, etc.) because even though in the general case we detest it, we generally agree there are special cases where it's acceptable because it's a choice of a lesser evil and also that some greater good is achieved because of it. This is exactly the argument behind waterboarding.

Do I like it? Of course not, I don't think any empathic, non-sadistic person would. But to call it torture and thus because it's torture it is inherently evil and therefore that there can never be any possible justification for it -- I find that an illogical and therefore invalid argument. At best, hypocritically inconsistent.

If anything I think the better case against waterboarding is whether it's effective. If it is not effective, either at extracting true and timely and useful information out of the subject, OR, in acting as a deterrent to other would-be conspirators, then that's a reasonable argument for dropping it. Another good argument is that it might drastically increase the chance that US soldiers, when captured by enemies, are themselves subjected to it. But at least with these arguments, there is nuance and there are trade-offs being considered. But to simply say X-is-always-wrong-and-should-never-be-done I find that to be a very weak argument considering all the other precedents that run in the opposite direction.

brazzy2• 16 years ago

But is the US government just showing up outside John & Jane Smith's house in Iowa, kidnapping the wife, a perfectly innocent suburban house mom, taking her away to a secret location and then waterboarding her in order to make her reveal her secret cookie recipe? Heck no.

Heck, yes. Or pretty close to it. Quite a few Gitmo inmates were completely innocent, they just were at the wrong place at the wrong time, or had the wrong surname, or had enemies who called them terrorists to get rid of a business rival, or to get the bounty that US was paying.

mkramlich4• 16 years ago

Good point. Mistakes happen.

It happens even when the US government (or state or local law enforcement authorities) kidnaps and enslaves native US citizens in the course of enforcing domestic criminal law. Later, some of these people get released. Some are found innocent. Some are not but the cases were flawed or some legal rule was not followed to the letter. And sometimes these people are found guilty by a court, serve sentences (in a prison as slaves) and are then let go, sometimes many years later. This is normal in the US and throughout the world. Unfortunately.

mkramlich4• 16 years ago

To clarify about your Gitmo point: the vast majority were not waterboarded. Going to Gitmo did/does not automatically mean being waterboarded. But point taken.

I thought of another good argument against waterboarding: the Geneva Convention. My understanding is that it is banned by it under all (or, well, proscribed) circumstances, and the US is signatory to it. I think part of the reason why the US wanted to do certain things NOT on mainland US soil was to be able to weasel around certain laws and international rules that address what they are and are not allowed to do.

When Papers Quit Calling Waterboarding 'Torture'

Related Stories