Responding to a "stupid" critique of his May 1 column defending the use of terror in "ticking timebomb" scenarios, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (5/15/09) asserts that there has too been a real-life example of such a situation:

On October 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

Krauthammer's column leaves out a key point of his argument, which is that Hamas was threatening to kill the captive unless Israel released 200 prisoners--that's the ticking time bomb.

It's certainly true that the fact that the Israeli prisoner was killed does not change Rabin's, or Krauthammer's, moral calculus.  Because the calculation is this: The value of the life of one individual from a group we identify with so far outweighs the human rights of a disfavored group that even the chance of saving him justifies torture.

Hamas made the same calculation from the opposite perspective: For them, threatening the life of one Israeli was worth it if it meant a chance of freedom for 200 Palestinians. And though Krauthammer is sarcastic about people who charge him with "moral deficiencies," I don't think his pro-torture ethics gives him much ability to explain to them why they're wrong.

In his latest Salon blog entry (5/1/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald displays his find of "a perfect illustration of how severely our political spectrum has shifted in the last two decades and how depraved and extremist our political and media classes have become"--one quote of the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer rebutting those who "believe you never torture. Ever":

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. . . .

as compared to the text from Article II/IV of the "Convention Against Torture, signed and championed" by none other than Ronald Reagan:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . .  Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law.

That Ronald Reagan's ideas "are ones that are now--in the view of our dominant media narrative--the hallmarks of The Hard Left" is clearly demonstrated by the fact that

Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.

A January 27 New York Times story, "The Epidemic That Wasn't," brought the news that researchers following children prenatally exposed to cocaine have found "the long-term effects of such exposure on children's brain development and behavior appear relatively small" and are "less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco."

Though the Times makes it sound like breaking news, the fact is many reputable people disbelieved the whole "crack baby" phenomenon from the beginning: Even Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose 1985 study spurred much of the early coverage, was lamenting as long ago as 1992 that medical research was being misused: "It's interesting, it sells newspapers and it perpetuates the us-vs.-them idea."

Did it ever. The despicable role played by the press corps is why the Times story feels not just too late but too little. The paper reports "there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to [crack cocaine] would produce a generation of severely damaged children," and goes on to cite inflammatory headlines as if they were merely reports on those fears, rather than the means of their creation. The truth is there would be no "crack baby" storyline if not for the zeal with which many in the press corps seized upon limited, qualified medical research as an excuse to at least entertain the idea of writing off huge numbers of overwhelmingly black and poor children. (Though the research pertained to cocaine in all forms, the story was always about crack, wasn't it?)

It wasn't a medical researcher who wrote, "The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth"; it was the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 7/30/89). Krauthammer had American Enterprise Institute media darling Douglas Besharov to thank for the term "bio-underclass", and Besharov wasn't shy about spelling out the wished-for social repercussions: "This is not stuff that Head Start can fix.... Whether it is 5 percent or 15 percent of the black community, it is there." Being violently wrong doesn't appear to have dimmed Besharov's media star; nor should we hold our breath for any apologies from Krauthammer for telling readers, "The dead babies may be the lucky ones."

The saddest part: Early on, researchers recognized that the social stigma attached to being identified as a "crack baby" could far outweigh any biological impact. The Times piece underscores that, with a source who says, "Society's expectations of the children and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity but by the social meaning" of the drug.

But it seems as though journalists are no more likely now than they were then to examine what it is about their own practices that would drive them to perpetuate such a "social meaning" when it was not supported by science and when its potential effects were so devastating.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel's assault on Gaza in today's paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale:

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah's massive rearmament, their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any preventive military action, lest it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing guard.

In other words, the Lebanese cease-fire is problematic because it is currently preventing an outbreak of violence.

The Associated Press reported on December 27 that "thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons."

In his latest column (1/2/09), Charles Krauthammer pointed to that report to prove just how obvious it is that Israel is the moral actor in this battle of good and evil:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel/Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger.

Here's what Amnesty International (12/29/08) has to say about it:

Compounding the atmosphere of fear resulting from the Israeli bombardments, Israeli forces have been sending seemingly random telephone messages to many inhabitants of Gaza telling them to leave their homes because of imminent air strikes against their houses. Such messages have been received by residents of multi-storey apartment building, causing panic not only for those who received the calls but for all their neighbours. Such practice was widely used by Israeli forces both in Gaza and in Lebanon in 2006, but has not been reported since. The threatening calls seem to aim to spread fear among the civilian population, as in most cases no air strikes were carried out against the buildings. If this is the purpose, rather than to give effective warning, this practice violates international law and must end immediately.

Anthony DiMaggio finds (ZNet, 10/19/08) "the massive attention surrounding ACORN" as much evidence of "media racism as it is their class prejudice":

In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers this election year. The attacks on ACORN must be understood within the context of this enfranchisement of dispossessed groups....

Media discussions of ACORN have predictably followed the talking points issued by Republican Party leaders to Fox News and right-wing radio.... The uniformity of conservative attacks on ACORN has been rather impressive, although hardly intellectual or informative. The editors at the Washington Times lambasted ACORN for being "either co-opted by an outside group bent on committing massive voter fraud to rig this election."... Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer draws attention to "Barack Obama's long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN."... Radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved and Fox News commentators such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have relentlessly emphasized the ACORN issue in their programs.

Aside from the fact that "there's only one problem with this narrative--none of it's true," DiMaggio is impressed that "the right-wing foot soldiers in the media, who couldn't have cared less what ACORN was doing months ago let alone describe what the acronym stood for, have now become independent experts on the organization's negligence and duplicity in destroying democracy."

Listen to FAIR's latest radio show CounterSpin: Lori Minnite on ACORN and Vote Fraud (10/17/08)