New York Times on the pending trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed ( 11/15/09–emphasis added):
Mr. Mohammed’s initial defiance toward his captors set off an interrogation plan that would turn him into the central figure in the roiling debate over the C.I.A’s interrogation methods. He was subjected 183 times to the near-drowning technique called waterboarding, treatment that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has called torture. But advocates of the C.I.A’s methods, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have said that the interrogation methods produced a trove of information that helped dismantle Al-Qaeda and disrupt potential terrorism attacks.
Apparently Holder’s views need to be balanced byDick Cheney’s.
More to the point, what Eric Holder thinks is torture is mostly irrelevant: If something is torture, then it should be called torture. The Times has failed on this question before; in 2004, the paper’s public editor Daniel Okrent wrote this response to a FAIR Action Alert (6/10/04):
But just as a terrorist is sometimes, in fact, a terrorist, torture is inescapably torture. The reader who moved me out of the muddled center on this did it with a simple question: “If the same things [that happened at Abu Ghraib] had been done to American prisoners by Iraqi authorities, would the Times have hesitated to use â┚¬Ã‹Å“tortureâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢ over and over again?”
Over the past five years, the paper has used the word to describe the actions of authorities in Iraq, China, Mexico, Turkey, Chad and elsewhere, including a precinct house in Brooklyn, in the Abner Louima case. In each case, I believe, there was a sense that the torturers were characterized, in part, by their otherness–other nationalities, other political systems, or in the Louima instance other, depraved moral codes.
In Iraq, the perpetrators of the prison horrors were our representatives–ordinary Americans whose behavior may have been altered by circumstances, but who in their origins and histories are as familiar to us as our neighbors and co-workers.
[New York Times standards editor Allan] Siegal, who notes that the Times has no policy on the use of “torture,” cautioned me in an e-mail that his sense of the word (and of “abuse”) was “impressionistic rather than researched,” but I buy what he ended up with: “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 prisonerâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s jailers maltreat her or him separately from the interrogation process.”
Siegal also acknowledges that there’s a continuum that has to be measured. If, for instance, a man is kept hooded for an hour, is that in itself torture? What about five hours? What about 24? If the headline language has in fact been delicate, maybe that’s because the distinctions are delicate. But as good reporting brings us greater knowledge of what has gone in prisons and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions become firm enough to be indisputable.
My question to the opponents of these harsh methods is – I support the decision that torture should NOT be used on detainees. That only reduces the US to their level. HOWEVER…
In the case of KSM, where he had sure knowledge of pending attacks against the US – and mild coercement did not work, whjat would they have done instead, lectured him to death or begged him to talk?
It’s a catch 22 but these desperate times do call for desperate measures and there is an exception to every rule.
Pace eurail pass, and the Times (“Mr. Mohammed’s initial defiance toward his captors set off an interrogation plan….”), I thought that it was revealed that KSM gave all of his meaningful information prior to being tortured, and mostly meaningless drivel (along with increasing resentment afterwards. I have no link, but am I mistaken, or were these reports debunked?
The NYT should be waterboarded 183 times!
No; I really don’t agree. No one ever knows what they’ll do under extreme circumstances but they can determine in advance what they would HOPE they would do. I hope that if someone had a bomb that was going to kill me, or my loved ones, or both of us, and only torture would persuade him to say where the bomb was, I would have the courage and the faith to say, “Don’t torture him”.
Torture is dehumanizing not only for the one tortured, but even more for the one doing the torturing. I don’t want to live at the cost of dehumanizing other people. I don’t want to be alive knowing that my life or the lives of those I love came at the cost of someone else’s agony.
I am sickened daily at the thought that the taxes I pay are paying for someone else’s screams and whimpers.