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 [...]
May
22
2009
CIA Tortured by Questions About Torturing
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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 [...]
May
20
2009
You Don't Get 'Thoughtful Conversation' From an Advocate for War Crimes
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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? [...]
May
17
2009
Media Silence on Pol 'Implicitly Endorsing' Inquisition
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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 [...]
May
15
2009
Examining the Paper of Record's Torture Record
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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 [...]
May
15
2009
Philly Paper Welcomes Home Native Torture Hero
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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 [...]
May
15
2009
Impoverished Papers Can't Afford Truth
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Hearing "the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog," the Colorado Independent's John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to "call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture"–"because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel": New York, N.Y.: What's the difference between the "harsh interrogations" I keep reading about in the Post and actual "torture"? If it's the same thing, then why not just call it "torture"? I don't get it. Aren't you guys continuing to catapult Bush-era propaganda when [...]
May
12
2009
PBS's 'Washington Bubble' Invisible to Inhabitants
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Noticing how PBS's Gwen Ifill has a penchant for "filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week," critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent "discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified was how the Obama administration should deal with the political fallout from the demands for a full-scale investigation and/or prosecution of the officials responsible for American torture." Kaiser's question of whether it would "ruin the discussion to have one person who believes that a full [...]
May
09
2009
NYT Names 'Harsh Tactics' as 'Torture' — by Chinese
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Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site's lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was "Tortured in a Chinese Prison." Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer's ordeal–"kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door…handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air"–to be "a major editorial breach" for the paper that so agilely dances around the T-word when reporting on U.S. actions: So that's torture now?… [...]
May
08
2009
Press Corp 'Dean' Preaches 'Purposeful Ignorance'
Quoting John Dewey's warning about "the proper role of the press in a democracy"–"a class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge"–Eric Alterman finds it (Nation, 5/6/09) "difficult to imagine a more telling–and disturbing–manifestation of Dewey's prediction than the current torture debate in Washington": Even after the disgraceful performance of so many armchair warriors during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, who would have dared predict the willingness, nay, eagerness, of respected journalists and pundits to argue in favor of purposeful ignorance? Sadly, many of them [...]
May
06
2009
NPR: 'Justifying and Sanitizing the U.S. Torture Regime'
Blogging on how May 4 and 5 broadcasts "feature NPR continuing its function of justifying and sanitizing the U.S. torture regime," dedicated public radio critic Mytwords (NPR Check, 5/5/09) plumbs the depths of NPR's aversion to "human rights or international law advocates or experts"–instead preferring "members or former members of various U.S. government agencies," even "the very ones implicated in formulating and carrying out torture": For a long time NPR news has minimized (June 2006), dismissed (February 2007), ignored (April 2007), covered over (October 2007) and collaborated with (December 2007) the use of torture by agencies and agents of the [...]
May
05
2009
On 'Normalized Torture' and Prosecution as a 'Cop-Out'
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Even though "James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis first told the world about waterboarding in May 2004," Dan Froomkin (WashingtonPost.com, 5/4/09) is having to argue that "that doesn't mean that the rest of us are as guilty as the people who committed the crimes–or that those who ordered those crimes should avoid accountability." While Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg and the Post's own Michael Kinsley are among those "arguing that the nation's collective guilt for torture is so great that prosecution is a cop-out," Froomkin has some "big problems with this argument": While it's true that the public's outrage over [...]
May
02
2009
And Now, From the 'Hard Left': Ronald Reagan
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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 [...]
