Seeing all the press attention given to pitbull-fighter and NFL star Michael Vick's return to football, David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 8/19/09) can't help but think that Vick

should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.

For those of his readers who may be "severely satire-impaired," Swanson explains that "No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured," but instead is simply "concerned" over how U.S. media "worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system."

"Of course I want torture prosecuted," Swanson writes, "but torture is a symptom. The illness is aggressive war."

Having recently "published a report on 1,200 photos of U.S. torture that I have examined but the public at large has not seen," activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 7/21/09) now relates how he

talked about the photos on a few progressive radio shows. I received calls from some advocacy groups that have been trying for years to get hold of these photos. But I received not one single inquiry from the corporate media. Even most good blogs ignored this story, despite a handful of prominent blogs promoting it. This started me thinking and fantasizing: What would the world look like if we had major media outlets that were worth more than a warm bucket of spit?

Imagine if the media monopolies were busted, a diversity of private outlets were free to compete, and public media were developed, including free substantive air time for election campaigns. Imagine media outlets with democratic accountability. Imagine media outlets that judged a story important if the majority of the public said so, and not if those in power said so.

The majority of the public favors single-payer healthcare. Corporate media outlets are crammed with endless, often pointless, stories about healthcare that never mention single-payer.

"Our existing media outlets (whose lead blogs follow more than bloggers admit to themselves) decide what's important based on the preferences of a small number of powerful people," says Swanson--"and the fact that these preferences almost always differ wildly from majority opinion does not lead to any rethinking of the acceptability of this approach in a democratic republic."

For further imaginings on the potential of a non-corporate U.S. press, read the latest issue of the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Future of Journalism" (7/09)

Asking his readers to "remember" that, on NBC, Chuck Todd "is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/15/09, ad-viewing required) examines a Todd appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe "discussing reports that [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair":

In response to virtually every media criticism (at least the few they acknowledge), establishment journalists will insist that their role is to be steadfastly neutral. They simply report on the debates, not take sides or express opinions about them. Taking one side or the other is not their role. Only partisan ideologues do that.

Yet here is Chuck Todd--who covers the White House for NBC News--explicitly arguing against investigations, and adopting the Bush/right-wing mentality to do so. Investigations are a distraction from what matters. It's extremely unfair to hold lawyers accountable when they authorize criminal conduct. It's "dangerous" for one administration to investigate the prior one where that prior administration had its DOJ lawyers authorize what was being done.

Wouldn't the standard claim of establishment journalists maintain that Chuck Todd shouldn't have (or at least not express) opinions on these topics? Yet here he is--as so many establishment journalists routinely do--explicitly advocating against investigations of Bush-era crimes. Even more notably, the arguments in favor of such investigations merit no mention whatsoever.

Reasonably asking, "Would anyone listening to this discussion even have the slightest idea what the arguments are in favor of investigating and prosecuting?," Greenwald can only conclude that "the notion that these establishment journalists don't choose sides and are mere honest brokers of debates is, rather obviously, transparent fiction."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9–10/08).

Brad Jacobson is resurrecting the "NYT Front|Back" feature of his Media Bloodhound blog (7/10/09)--spotlighting the New York Times' "penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages"--only for "the most egregious and absurd examples."

The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, "In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot":

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record.... The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. "I couldn’t wait to get my next script," she said.

There's no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

Jacobson commiserates with the Times editors' concerns: "Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly 10 percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography!"

Meanwhile, the same day's placement of an "In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights" piece way back on page A18 has Jacobson convinced that "apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages":

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts....

"So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Looking past "this article's banishment to the back pages," Jacobson notes how "the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement"--the facts being that "scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S.," but only "after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls 'brutal' interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls 'torture.'"

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an update (7/2/09, ad-viewing required) on "several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR's ban on using the word 'torture' to describe the Bush administration's interrogation tactics":

Given the utter vapidity of her rationale ("there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?"), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches "Media Ethics" to graduate students at Georgetown University....

NPR's "torture" ban and its ombudsman's incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR--and rightfully so. Yesterday, the Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard's refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard's refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR's policy. (Indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR's steadfast refusal to use the word "torture" and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that.)

Despite Shepard's avoidance of him, Greenwald notes that she "went on another NPR-affiliated show" for a segment "that included several good questions" and "a very well-compiled, illustrative and cringe-inducing montage of NPR's repeatedly going out of its way to avoid calling Bush interrogation tactics 'torture,' juxtaposed with an excerpt where NPR explicitly accused Iraqis in Sadr City of 'using torture' against detainees."

Read more on NPR's longstanding problematic reporting on U.S. torture--and Alicia Shepard's inconsistent defense of it--in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Tortured Justifications for Bad Journalism" (12/07) by Jim Naureckas & Candice O'Grady.

Deeming "the battle against baseless, worthless grants of anonymity by journalists" to be "at this point, probably futile," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (6/15/09, ad-viewing required) is exasperated to see how "even many of the nation's best and most valuable reporters--such as the New Yorker's Jane Mayer--seem helplessly addicted to it." Greenwald points to "an otherwise solid and at times enlightening article on CIA Director Leon Panetta and his resistance to investigating past CIA abuses" in which Mayer

includes this passage at the beginning of her article to explain how Panetta was chosen only after Obama's first choice, John Brennan, was rejected:

A friend of Brennan's from his C.I.A. days complained to me, "After a few Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear who write blogs voiced objections to Brennan, the Obama Administration pulled his name at the first sign of smoke, and then ruled out a whole class of people: Anyone who had been at the agency during the past 10 years couldn't pass the blogger test."

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past 10 years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses. Second, unlike the individual who is willing to spout these insults only while cowardly hiding behind Mayer's shield of anonymity, the bloggers who led the opposition to Brennan (including myself and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan) all attached their names to their views and--as Spencer Ackerman notes--are about as far away as one can be from the trite, adolescent cartoons spewed by Mayer's anonymous insulter. Third, one of the principal points of Mayer's long article is that the objections to Brennan have been vindicated, because--as Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser--he has led the way in urging Obama to keep past CIA abuses suppressed and Bush crimes protected from accountability.

While "the anonymous name-calling Mayer passes on appears on the first page of her piece," Greenwald discovers that way down "on page 5, she includes the facts that show how factually false is the characterization of the objections to Brennan"--there Mayer personally admits that "in an interview with me two years ago, Brennan defended the use of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).

In a Smirking Chimp piece (5/29/09) averring that "Everyone Should See Torturing Democracy"--the delayed documentary that "recounts how the Bush White House and the Pentagon decided to make coercive detention and abusive interrogation the official U.S. policy" and "also credits the brave few who stood up to those in power"--PBS' Bill Moyers spells out the larger consequences of the fact that "in all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all":

Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism of course has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantánamo Bay into a "wedge issue," as noted on the front page of Sunday's New York Times.

According to the Times, "Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles."

Moyers gives us the upshot: "No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we're not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning." See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to ‘Waterboarding’: Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald; "Torturing Language: Definitions, Defenses and Dirty Work" (7-8/05) by Jacqueline Bacon.

Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that "there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell," and as proof offers "Powell's disingenuous response" to Bob Schieffer's May 24 CBS Face the Nation "question about the ex-secretary of state's knowledge regarding 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' which the International Committee of the Red Cross and virtually all other objective observers say constituted torture": Powell--whom, Parry recalls, "was a member of President George W. Bush's Principals Committee, which oversaw the interrogation policies"--claimed to an unchallenging Schieffer, "to have been kept mostly out of the loop.... He was 'not privy' to the legal memos authorizing the abusive treatment."

Such transparent tripe was left to the renegade Washington Stakeout questioner (and longtime FAIR associate) to take on:

Outside the CBS News' Washington offices after the interview, media analyst Sam Husseini asked Powell what he knew about the torture of al-Qaeda suspect Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who made false claims linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, lies that Powell then cited in his infamous pro-invasion speech before the United Nations on February 5, 2003.

"I don't have any details on the al-Libi case," Powell responded.

When asked when he learned that some of the bogus evidence had been extracted by torture, Powell said, "I don't know that. I don't know what information you're referring to. So I can't answer."

And when Husseini explained to Powell "that the information had been publicly discussed by Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson," Powell was reduced to a grade school reply of "So what?" All of which leads Parry to some questions of his own--"Did Powell participate in the Principals Committee?... Did he object to the abusive techniques... that he says 'were judged not to be torture'?--and to a pointed conclusion:

For a Washington press corps that has been up in arms challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA obscured key details of the harsh interrogations from congressional leaders, it was impressive to see how little skepticism was evinced by Powell's claim of ignorance from his seat on Bush's Principals Committee.

See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Does the CIA Ever Lie?: Parsing the Pelosi Torture Controversy" (5/20/09)

Wondering "why NPR decided it was appropriate to present Cheney's blatantly self-serving propaganda as anything remotely relevant to current policy," NPR Check contributor Brian (5/23/09) blogs about current president Barack Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney recently "attacking the policies of the other administration and defending their own positions in speeches." Even though each was given "in front of friendly audiences unable to challenge them," NPR's Morning Edition of May 22 "presented them as a face-to-face debate between the two men, alternating soundbites from each," and giving

Cheney equal billing with the president in a piece titled "Obama, Cheney: Different Views on National Security." The title is offensive not only because it presents Cheney's views as equally relevant as the current president's, but also because it refers to the crimes of torture, the prison at Guantánamo Bay and indefinite detention without trial as simply "national security." (At least the extended Web version of the "debate" is titled "Obama, Cheney Face Off on Torture.")

In case you've forgotten, Brian writes that, "yes, this is the same Dick Cheney who... has every motivation to cover up the various crimes committed under his reign in the Bush administration. So one might reasonably ask, Who gives a shit what Dick Cheney has to say now?"

Amy Goodman recently interviewed independent journalist Jeremy Scahill on her Democracy Now! show (5/19/09) regarding the fact that, in Scahill's words, "while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantánamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force" known as the Immediate Reaction Force. Describing the methods of this "thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners"--"They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner... douse them with chemical agents.... They've squeezed their testicles.... They've taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner"--Scahill tells us the results, and their reaction:

In February of this year, about a month after Obama was inaugurated, there were 16 prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo. The ...Immediate Reaction Force was used to go in and violently shove massive tubes down their noses into their stomachs.... They would use no anesthetics or any painkillers, shove this massive tube by force down their nose into their stomach and then yank it out. Some prisoners have described this as torture, torture, torture. And many have passed out from the sheer pain of this operation.

When Scahill mentions that "this force has received almost no scrutiny in the U.S. Congress or the U.S. media and operates at this moment," Goodman wonders, "How do you know about this?" It turns out Scahill used a little-known tactic called "reporting": "I discovered these teams, because I've been covering the investigation being done by Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain into the Bush torture system":

And yet, the only time when it's really made any kind of a flash in the corporate media was when a U.S. soldier, a young guy named Sean Baker... was ordered, he says, by his superiors to dress up in an orange jumpsuit and play the part of a restive or combative detainee at Guantánamo. He was told that the team that was going to come in to handle him knew that he was a U.S. soldier, knew that it was a training drill, and he was given a word, a codeword, "red," that when he said it, the beating was supposed to stop.... He describes them just mercilessly beating him, and he's yelling out "Red!" and they continue to beat him, even after he then said, "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!"

And the fate of not-even-real-prisoner Baker?--he "has permanent brain damage, suffers from multiple seizures, and had actually sued Rumsfeld and other officials because of his treatment."

The independent website Raw Story (5/6/09) recently summarized the human toll of the U.S. government's torture program.  Approximately 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to human rights investigators, with 34 of those deaths officially classified as homicides; at least eight individuals were tortured to death.

Yet somehow, when corporate media report on the torture program's victims, they focus on the CIA, the agency that designed and helped implement the array of torture techniques known as "enhanced interrogation."  A  May 19 article by Walter Pincus, intelligence correspondent for the Washington Post, is a particularly gross example.

Pincus described the CIA as "battered by recriminations over waterboarding and other harsh techniques," and "girding itself for more public scrutiny."  The article presented the agency's view that "it is being forced to take the blame for actions approved by elected officials that have since fallen into disfavor."

"Fallen into disfavor"--that's one way to describe it.  Another way would be to say that these actions were violations of U.S. and international law, not to mention the Constitution, all of which clearly prohibit torture.

Usually when people are "forced to take the blame" for criminal actions, they are put on trial.  But Pincus notes that President Obama has promised that CIA torturers will not face punishment if they followed the Bush administration's torture guidelines.

But, writes Pincus, "agency personnel still face subpoenas and testimony under oath before criminal, civil and congressional bodies." His example: A grand jury investigation into the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.  So even though CIA officers been effectively pardoned for the crime of torture, they still may have to answer for destroying the evidence.  Life can be so unfair sometimes.

Pincus cites a CIA officer's anguished plea, "Will I be in trouble five years from now for what I agree to do today?" In Pincus' world, the idea that a spy could commit a crime and not get away with it is a sign that something is very wrong.

Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed columnist Harold Jackson (5/20/09) writes that most of those who have criticized his paper for hiring of pro-torture lawyer John Yoo as his colleague "have their facts wrong."
After making a gratuitous swipe at bloggers ("who never let the facts get in the way when they're trying to whip people into a frenzy to boost website hits"), Jackson gets down to specifics: "To set the record straight, no one tried to hide Yoo's becoming a regular columnist," he declares. If that's the case, why isn't Yoo listed on the Inquirer's website along with its other regular columnists?

That seems to be the one specific fact that the critics got "wrong," actually. The rest of the column is a defense of the Inquirer's judgment in hiring Yoo to "counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left," and to "make sure our pages present alternative points of view."

It's kind of funny, the line about countering criticism--the whole point of the column is that the paper's gotten a lot of criticism about hiring Yoo, but the response to that criticism is not to hire someone representing the critics' point of view, but to tell them to stop reading blogs.

In point of fact, the Inquirer's columnists do not all represent the left. In addition to Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who got 16 percent of the Philadelphia vote in his last election, the lineup also features Kevin Ferris, who writes his own defenses of torture and condemns Barack Obama's "Dangerous Naivete in Foreign Policy." And Michael Smerconish, a more moderate conservative who has filled in as a substitute host for Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough.

There's five other columnists listed by the paper, all with backgrounds in corporate journalism. Some of them are mildly liberal; none of them are likely to be mistaken for I.F. Stone. Certainly none of them are prominent figures in progressive politics, a left-wing counterpart to Santorum.

And who would be the left-wing counterpart to Yoo, exactly? Bill Ayers? That's unfair to Ayers, whose actions, however reckless, didn't end up killing anybody.

This is the trouble with treating Yoo as someone who merely "provide[s] the catalyst for intelligent discourse": Torture is illegal under U.S. law and a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And, despite the indignation Jackson seems to feel over the "very pleasant" Yoo being called a "war criminal" by emailers, it's classified as, yes, a war crime by international law.

When influential institutions treat those responsible for such things as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than "thoughtful conversation."

Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham's statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that "one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work," Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is "implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition's brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the 15th to 17th centuries," and posits that "in a normal world, one might have expected national outrage over a prominent U.S. senator speaking favorably of the Spanish Inquisition, which pioneered innovations in torture... including the water torture now known as waterboarding":

Beyond the inhumanity of the Inquisition, there is the troubling fact that the torture tactics did "work" only in the sense that they extracted many false confessions and got victims to implicate other individuals who were, in turn, persecuted, tortured and put to death for their religious beliefs.

But Graham's praise for the efficacy of the Inquisition's torture tactics passed largely unnoticed--and without any perceptible criticism--in the American news media. The Washington Post article on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing didn't even mention Graham's extraordinary remark; a brief New York Times article about the hearing mentioned it only in passing.

Remarking on how "Graham is still considered a Republican 'moderate' regarding Bush’s 'war on terror' policies," Parry notes a stark "contrast to the quiet acceptance of Graham’s views on the Inquisition’s torture tactics" and how "Washington news media flew into near hysteria over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tortured explanations of what she knew about Bush's torture policies."

Giving us a glimpse at "a large part of what was left on the editor's floor" from his On the Media NPR interview, Harpers.org's Scott Horton (5/12/09) writes of "the New York Times and its history of dealing with the word 'torture'":

I noted that in the pre-Bush era, the Times had absolutely no compunction about calling certain practices "torture," but when the Bush administration began to use them, the word was suddenly off-limits, or only used in the most circumspect way ("a practice which critics of the administration call 'torture,'" for instance). A good example can be found in reporting about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, on which the Times played an essential role. The Khmer Rouge's waterboarding was "torture." But Bush Administration waterboarding is just an "enhanced interrogation technique." What’s behind the distinction? It's a blend of fear and hypocrisy.

To Horton, the reality is that "the Times policy enables torture"--here's his quote from a 1945 George Orwell letter on the matter:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization.... I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

Horton says "the Times needs to make that moral effort,"calling their "failure to do so... alarming." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to 'Waterboarding': Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald

Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, "by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of greatest peril to the U.S. Constitution in modern memory":

It was widely known in 2008, for example, that Yoo had argued for presidential powers far beyond anything either real or implied in the Constitution--that the commander-in-chief could trample the powers of Congress or a free press in an endless undeclared war, or that the 4th Amendment barring unreasonable search and seizure didn't apply in fighting what Yoo called domestic terrorism.

Most famously, Yoo was known as the author of the infamous "torture memos" that in 2002 and 2003 gave the Bush and Cheney the legal cover to violate the human rights of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such torture practices did not apply. Working closely with Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul.

Bunch notifies us that, despite all this, his "colleagues upstairs at the Philadelphia Inquirer--with none of the fanfare that might normally accompany such a move"--decided "to sign a contract with Yoo in late 2008 to give him a regular monthly column." Bunch explains that the paper "thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism--to write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo."