When Papers Quit Calling Waterboarding 'Torture'
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
Newspapers have a journalistic duty to be impartial, or at least a marketing duty to appear impartial. (News outlets that seem partial lose prestige, and hence compete in a different niche--contrast the New York Times and the New York Post.) Who must they appear impartial to? Their audience, of course--and the primary audience for American newspapers is Americans. Now, when the American executive branch and one out of two political parties seriously claims that waterboarding is not torture, you suddenly seem partial to Americans if you openly contradict that claim, because the question of whether waterboarding is torture has moved from accepted wisdom to controversy. Clouding all of this, of course, is that the controversy itself is nothing more than a semantic argument. Another contributing factor is ignorance--waterboarding went from an obscure torture technique which comparatively few people knew about to an active political issue, which means a lot of people who knew absolutely nothing about waterboarding until the administration said "we're for it and we're doing it" made up their minds at that instant, based on their opinion of the administration.
Weaker forms of this are seen when, for instance, news outlets give equal time to cranks when reporting on science, because there's "controversy" over whether evolution is real or whether the earth is really 4 billion years old. It's easy to find more examples if you look out for them.
Actually, they don't: journalism's duty is to be truthful, not impartial: if somebody lies, it's the journalist's duty to show that they're lying, not to do the he-said, she-said tango.
Also, a link to the original report on which the posted article is based: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/tort...
No, the original link serves a different purpose. Andrew Sullivan is not your average news aggregator, and his commentary on the subject brings in a lot of weight. In addition, there are links in his article which show his prior research in this area along with a piece by Salon. Thirdly, some people prefer a quick newspaper style summary rather than an abstract from a peer reviewed journal.
This is in comparison to the data-free explanation of the article, that an unspecified conspiracy in the NYT sold out to an unspecified faction in the Bush 42 administration under unspecified pressure. It's not even a conspiracy theory. Rolling Stone and Drudge would require better sourcing to print such vacuous trollop. HN is a poor venue for politics, and an even poorer venue for empty political traffic-whoring.
Now next time you are thinking about a useless post, imagine the downvotes, the reply, and then the bit where you actually post something useful.
But then just post the useful bit.
Also there was no strawman argument in my comment unless you make an assumption that is wrong going into the reading of it. I made an independent argument formulated based on how I perceived and analyzed the topic that the OA was addressing. I did not misrepresent the author's position, nor did I claim to refute the narrow point of his article. I was intentionally not addressing his narrow core claim (dealing with the change in mainstream media terminology, theorized to have been done in order to become more in alignment with a desired change in the public narrative by vested interests) -- by intent -- and instead addressing the larger issue and assumptions made by the OA's article. And I put a lot of thought and care into what I wrote -- with no cursing, name-calling and with good spelling and grammar (generally) -- and don't think it deserved to be downvoted into karma penalty land.
Votes should be based on the quality of the contribution to a discussion, not on a mere I-agree/I-disagree or on emotional reactions.
Take the case where someone is suddenly surrounded in the street, forced into a vehicle and taken away. That's normally called kidnapping. But if police do it, it's called an arrest. If a person is held against their will in a cold small cell and their movements and actions strictly limited, and treated like an animal or child most of us would consider that cruel and inhumane and label it as slavery. But if it is inside a "prison" and said person had violated a law and that is our justification for them being there then it is "okay" and not evil to be doing that to them.
And almost all societies have been doing this for thousands of years. Nothing new here. Move along.
But one day the issue of waterboarding comes up, as it relates to US treatment of some terrorists caught in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Is it unpleasant? You bet. Extremely? No doubt. But is the US government just showing up outside John & Jane Smith's house in Iowa, kidnapping the wife, a perfectly innocent suburban house mom, taking her away to a secret location and then waterboarding her in order to make her reveal her secret cookie recipe? Heck no. That's not what was happening. Far from it, according to the published reports. Instead, the US government used this technique only on "bad guys" -- and by that term I mean folks for whom there was enough evidence that any reasonable person would agree that he had been engaged in evil & illegal acts such is killing or planning to kill innocent US non-combatant civilians. Such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planning mastermind behind the 9/11 operation. Am I going to lose any sleep at all over him being waterboarded IF the goal was getting useful information out of him to further fight/dismantle Al Qaeda and prevent future murders? Heck no. Do I think it is wrong for him to be waterboarded? I'm not sure. At best it's in some shades of grey area. I think kidnapping is wrong, I think slavery is wrong and I think murder is wrong but every single day in this country and in many countries around the world citizens already give their governments a free pass at doing exactly these things. And we as citizens allow it (assuming democracies, people have ultimate control over laws, etc.) because even though in the general case we detest it, we generally agree there are special cases where it's acceptable because it's a choice of a lesser evil and also that some greater good is achieved because of it. This is exactly the argument behind waterboarding.
Do I like it? Of course not, I don't think any empathic, non-sadistic person would. But to call it torture and thus because it's torture it is inherently evil and therefore that there can never be any possible justification for it -- I find that an illogical and therefore invalid argument. At best, hypocritically inconsistent.
If anything I think the better case against waterboarding is whether it's effective. If it is not effective, either at extracting true and timely and useful information out of the subject, OR, in acting as a deterrent to other would-be conspirators, then that's a reasonable argument for dropping it. Another good argument is that it might drastically increase the chance that US soldiers, when captured by enemies, are themselves subjected to it. But at least with these arguments, there is nuance and there are trade-offs being considered. But to simply say X-is-always-wrong-and-should-never-be-done I find that to be a very weak argument considering all the other precedents that run in the opposite direction.
Heck, yes. Or pretty close to it. Quite a few Gitmo inmates were completely innocent, they just were at the wrong place at the wrong time, or had the wrong surname, or had enemies who called them terrorists to get rid of a business rival, or to get the bounty that US was paying.
I thought of another good argument against waterboarding: the Geneva Convention. My understanding is that it is banned by it under all (or, well, proscribed) circumstances, and the US is signatory to it. I think part of the reason why the US wanted to do certain things NOT on mainland US soil was to be able to weasel around certain laws and international rules that address what they are and are not allowed to do.
As for whether waterboarding is torture under US law: the US executed a few Kempaitai (Japanese secret police) agents for torturing US prisoners in WWII; they had waterboarded them. Waterboarding is also covered under UNCAT.
(Note to anyone assuming a partisan motivation: I am a serious Catholic, thus not by any stretch of the imagination a US liberal.)
There are several "Geneva Conventions". The US has signed some of them.
In general, the Geneva conventions only apply when both parties are signatories. Since the Taliban and such orgs aren't signatories ....
And the conventions quite definitely do apply to some degree when a signatory fights an opponent that is not a nation (and which therefore, by definition, cannot be a signatory). The details are a bit difficult, especially when a conflict is both internations and involves non-nation parties, but it's definitely not correct to say "our opponents are not signatories, so all rules are off".
It happens even when the US government (or state or local law enforcement authorities) kidnaps and enslaves native US citizens in the course of enforcing domestic criminal law. Later, some of these people get released. Some are found innocent. Some are not but the cases were flawed or some legal rule was not followed to the letter. And sometimes these people are found guilty by a court, serve sentences (in a prison as slaves) and are then let go, sometimes many years later. This is normal in the US and throughout the world. Unfortunately.