On August 7, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet wrote a brief piece for the Times Insider website that more or less declared the newspaper was going to start calling torture torture. While this is probably good news, there are some important questions to pose about the rationale behind the decision.
There have been many battles over the Newspaper of Record’s failure to adequately describe US torture policies. Ten years ago FAIR was critiquing the paper for reporting on CIA torture practices without calling them such (Action Alert, 5/14/04).
While this shift brings the Times closer to the position of its critics, Baquet’s explanation of it is curious. He states that when the stories first appeared “the situation was murky.” He notes that torture has a particular legal definition– but that the “Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of ‘torture.'”
So what has changed? Baquet references the “recent fight over the Senate report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation program,” and then suggests that the “landscape has shifted.” He writes:
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.
It’s not just a matter of knowing more, though. Baquet adds that the Justice Department
has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program. The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked–-that is, whether they generated useful information that the government could not otherwise have obtained from prisoners.
He closes by telling readers that the Times “will use 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.”
Much of his reasoning is questionable. For starters, the shift seems motivated in part by decisions made by other government officials– a Senate report highly critical of the CIA’s torture practices and the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute those responsible for torture. This is journalistically dubious, since it is essentially arguing that calling torture by its name was not advisable until those responsible for overseeing the torture were in the clear, legally speaking. Along those lines, Baquet draws on the fact that now “the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked.” But that is precisely one of the long-standing problems with torture coverage– restricting it to a discussion of utility and not legality. Overall, one gets the sense that the paper has decided that it is politically safe, ten years down the road, to call torture by its name.
As for the idea that sufficient details were only recently available, it’s worth noting that the Times had reported the use of sleep deprivation on terrorism suspects as early as 2002. A May 13, 2004 Times piece established some of the essential facts about the CIA program. The Times reported on the CIA waterboarding of one prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The Times also reported that, according to US officials “detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.”
One Times report from a decade ago cited a US military investigation inquiry into torture methods that had resulted in the deaths of some prisoners (9/17/04):
“Interrogation techniques intended only for Guantanamo came to be used in Afghanistan and Iraq,” a separate report by an independent panel, appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld and headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, found in August. “In Afghanistan, techniques included removal of clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, use of stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs, and sleep and light deprivation.”
And a March 4, 2003 article led with this:
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s American captors are likely to use tactics like sleep deprivation and psychological manipulation in trying to pry information from him, officials said today
That piece was headlined “Questioning of Accused Expected to Be Humane, Legal and Aggressive.”
So it’s a stretch to suggest that the use of torture was not adequately “understood” until recently. Whatever the full extent of the program, there was sufficient evidence to call it torture.
And Baquet’s guidelines for using the term torture–“incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information”–is too narrow. In fact, something like it has been floated by the Times before. In response to FAIR 2004 alert (Activism Update, 6/10/04), Times assistant managing editor Allan Siegal tried to offer distinction between torture and “abuse”:
Torture occurs when a prisoner is physically or psychologically maltreated during the process of interrogation, or as punishment for some activity or political position. Abuse occurs when the prisoner’s jailers maltreat her or him separately from the interrogation process.
But as FAIR noted, the 1984 Convention Against Torture covers more than just interrogations:
any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.
So it’s not clear why the new Times policy is as narrow as it is.
Finally, while some of the headlines about this shift might be of the “Times to Call Torture Torture” variety, there is an important distinction to make here. The Times has a record of plainly calling torture by its name– so long as the torture is being committed by other countries (Extra!, 6/08). One study found that the Times called waterboarding torture over 80 percent of the time (Salon, 6/30/10) from the 1930s until 2004. After then, the word torture almost never appeared in connection with waterboarding, since the United States had become the torturers.
So is the Times‘ apparent shift good news? In one sense, it certainly is. Reporting that uses plain language to describe government abuses is better than reporting that does not. But the fact remains that it took the paper a decade to come to this conclusion, and the Times appears to have done so only after they were reassured that the torturers will not face justice.
Dean Baquet and NYT are consistent torturers themselves: they torture language and their credibility.
Excellent article, Peter.
Excellent work you do too.
The Times’ failure is criminal behaviour. A total lapse of ethics to the point of condoning, aiding and abetting illegal and immoral actions done for the purpose of political convenience.
It’s the defining attribute of the Bush/Obama years.
Perhaps the “landscape has shifted” following NYTimes reporter James Risen’s recent difficulties protecting his sources from our “justice” department?
A tortuous explanation as to why “torture” is now “fit to print”, don’t you think?
Such a despicable lock-step with media flagship and corporate government on such despicable crimes. Savages.
Thanks for saying what needed to be said,.. again…
At the time, when discussing the issue with acquaintances and friends, i was just amazed that our abrogating of the GenevaConventions seemed to hold so little weight with them; and even many so-called pundits in the media. I’ not sure the U.S. is safer as result of this practice, (and felt our soldiers if captured probably are not)..
This should not be news. It should not have happened. These were editorial decisions that were not based on telling the truth but fear of offending the US gov administration at the time. It is consistent with other decisions that they made at the time such as the refusal to publish the story about NSA illegal spying and whistleblowers.
NYT’s quivering explanation of its “language recalibration” is so odd that I wonder if it’s the act of an entity operating under a legal threat or inhibiting private agreement of some kind. Did BushCo get to and coerce the NYT Co?
This reminds me of Clinton splitting hair over the term BJ. In this case BJ stands for Bad Journalism. The standard for reporting on torture should be international law to which we are a signatory.
One would suspect that it has little to do with wishing to set the record straight, and more along the lines that the Bushivites Stasi were making sure that nobody would discover their little “inconvenient Truth” before they had all their butts covered. Otherwise one might have had a visit from Darth Cheney and the Naked Emperor Bush.
The truth is that the CIA, NSA, FBI, don’t care about ethics or morality. The pretend they do. But they don’t. And they are not supposed to. They are there to defend the economic interests of the Empire. Which in reality means the economic and financial interests of the MNCs and the banks, controlled by the oligarchs. The biggest issue is how to stop China and Russia. Can Latin America be recovered and how? The Middle East is a mess, thanks largely to the U.S. But the Saudis and the Emirates cannot be lost, and now a miracle: appeared this Sisi in Egypt, a ruthless dictator the CIA can count on… So, torture, rendering, inhumanity, cruelty in Gizmo … Be serious man, American interests are at stake …
It wasn’t torture because George Bush said it wasn’t and Bush said it wasn’t because his lawyer told him it wasn’t and the NYTimes said OK.
Well, now that all the statutes of limitations have run and it is too late for truth to make a difference in outcome or policy, the NYT decides to call a spade a spade.
The only defense that I can think of for the NYT’s delay is that torture, like negligence or other legal theory, is a legal conclusion denoting that a crime or unlawful act has indeed occurred. Perhaps the NYT could justify its skitishness had it printed the legal definition of torture alongsde the published acts, giving its readers the a jury-like opportunity to decide if laws were broken. But even this the NYT did not do.
Also, the NYT could tell us what was the least brutal act for which we sentenced Japanese soldiers to death after WW 2. I’d think you’d find that many hanged for deeds far less abominable than what Bush and Cheney approved. This is the klind of context the NYT just won’t provide when it counts, because they are, when the game is on the line, just truckling scribes for the elite.
Finally, all this reminds me of Israel’s 30 year statute of limitations on murder, which they passed in 1952, at which time Israel was rightfully but ironically arguing that there should be no statue of limitations for Nazi war criminals. Of course, in 1948, Yasheva Cohn had murdered UN envoy Count Folke Bernadotte at the behest of Begin, Ben-Gurion, and Rabin, all conspirators disappointed that the Count was about to have the UN pass a resolution calling for a smaller Israeli state. Cohn confessed to his crimes after the 30 years and became a hero to many. The crowning irony is that it was Sweden’s Count Folke himself who convinced the Nazis to releae 10,000 Jews in the famous “white crosses” episode, so named because those were the markings on the buses that the Count used to transport the Jews from certain execution in 1945. 3 yeqars later, the Israeli terrorists took his life to thank him. The Count’s contributions to humanity and his atrocious demise have been covered up by the dutiful US press for years.