Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Glenn Greenwald has a post about the New York Times' blatant hypocrisy when it comes to using the word "torture." They pointedly refuse to use that word in relation to waterboarding and other techniques ordered by the Bush administration to be used on detainees, but it has no problem using it when another country does the same things we did.
When Iran does it? That's torture. Here's what the Times had to say on July 4th about tactics used by Iran on dissidents:
Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a "velvet" revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran's disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say. . . .The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. . . .
In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in.
"They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year," Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. "They eventually broke my resistance."
Isn't that terrible? That evil Iranian government used coercion and torture to get people to confess to things they didn't do. Greenwald responds:
Virtually every tactic which the article describes the Iranians as using has been used by the U.S. during the War on Terror, while several tactics authorized by Bush officials (waterboarding, placing detainees in coffin-like boxes, hypothermia) aren't among those the article claims are used by the Iranians. Nonetheless, "torture" appears to be a perfectly fine term for The New York Times to use to describe what the Iranians do, but one that is explicitly banned to describe what the U.S. did. Despite its claimed policy, the NYT has also recently demonstrated its eagerness to use the word "torture" to describe these same tactics . . . when used by the Chinese against an American detainee.Notably, the NYT article today seems to take particular offense that the Iranian Government is putting people on trial using confessions they obtained via torture ("the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy -- after confessions were extracted").
And yet our own government, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, wants to use coerced confessions obtained under torture to convict detainees at Gitmo. But apparently that doesn't count because....well, I don't know. Because we're good guys and they're bad guys? Because we had our fingers crossed?
Politics
Comments
The NYT is not a staunch Shrub supporter. I cannot understand why they would stand on the wrong side of this.
Posted by: MikeMa | July 14, 2009 9:23 AM
This is the same NY TImes that lied about WMDs in Iraq, and totally mischaracterized IAEA reports on Iran. See IranAffairs.com for an analysis of their reporting on Iran's nuclear program.
Posted by: hass | July 14, 2009 10:30 AM
Five days without sleep! Forced to stand in front of a wall for hours! Bah! Try Gitmo you lighweight. Don't come crying to me until you've been waterboarded *at least* 150 times.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
Seriously though given the choice I think I'd rather be jailed as a dissident in Iran than a suspected al Qaeda operative in Gitmo.
Mike
Posted by: NoAstronomer | July 14, 2009 10:34 AM
The NPR ombudsman basically defended the same practice by NPR. USA! USA! USA!
Posted by: Lorax | July 14, 2009 10:41 AM
You just don't get it... when we do it, it's a "good thing" (tm). When the Japs did it, we executed them because it was a "bad thing" (tm). When we
tortureuse extra special methods, it's a good thing because we are good. When bad people do it then it's bad. Perhaps you need some extra special convincing?Posted by: Tom | July 14, 2009 10:44 AM
You might want to refresh your memory on the whole Judith Miller story. The NYT sure supported Shrub on that one.
Posted by: xebecs | July 14, 2009 11:03 AM
xebecs
I agree it has happened on a number of occasions that Shrub or Darth Cheney has gotten a bye not only from the Times but from almost all the 'regular' media. (Still don't know what Cheney talked about or who he talked to on those energy meetings.) It just seems such a silly thing to defend. Either X = X or it doesn't. You'd have to be from the Discovery Institute to argue that it doesn't.
Posted by: MikeMa | July 14, 2009 11:36 AM
MikeMa: Sadly, much of the media seems to have lost the ability to process logical propositions. They have gotten lost in "truthiness", as Stephen Colbert would call it.
Posted by: xebecs | July 14, 2009 11:48 AM
Old news, try and keep up.
Posted by: faustfire | July 14, 2009 2:05 PM
I have to defend the Times here just a bit.
Judith Miller wasn't a liar. She was snowed. And worse, she couldn't admit to being snowed.
More than that, there was a lot of pressure for the press not to look "unpatriotic." That was a failure -- a gigantic one-- on the part of the Times' managers.
The reporters -- a few of whom I happen to know -- are not, by and large, Bush supporters. Management is another story, but that is often the case in many newsrooms.
Posted by: Jesse | July 14, 2009 11:16 PM
Judith Miller wasn't a liar?
That's pretty much bullshit. If she didn't know at the beginning, she had to know at some point. When she became aware (for me that would be when only I had the juiciest news stories, while everyone else was getting squat from Bushco) and did not come clean; well, fuck Judy and the keyboard she rode in on.
There aren't many excuses for sloppy journalism; there are no excuses for what Miller did.
Posted by: democommie | July 15, 2009 7:24 AM
Jesse stated:
I agree she was not a liar during the pre-war Iraq period, but she was some combination of lazy, ambituous, or driven by ideology. When Cheney's office was feeding her a version of events, the CIA and our allies' intelligence agencies were leaking like a sieve that Cheney and Rumsfeld's offices were manipulating "outlier" observations (the CIA's words) into observations of absolute certainty. Her failure was she didn't adequately cross-check Cheney/Rumsfeld's offices' assertions against those formally chartered with creating analyses from the raw data in spite of other reporters doing the same and therefore coming up with different conclusions in their stories.
In an ingenius twist of circular logic, Bush Administration officials would then go on TV and point to Miller's reporting to justify our invading Iraq. The implication being that if the New York Times, a liberal standard-bearer was reporting the existence of WMDs and programs during a conservative Administration, well - it must be true when in fact they're the very ones who fed her this story.
Post Iraq-invasion she also used second hand rumors to create stories that we found WMDs in Iraq, when we had not. By this time it could be argued her conservative beliefs were driving her agenda given her unwillingness to corroborate stories that conflicted with the conservative view of reality. A good example is her refusal to concede that the trailers she claimed were mobile weapons labs were not even after they were validated as harmless. She's further validated that speculation given her joining the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research - a conservative think tank, and now being employed by Fox News.
Posted by: Michael Heath | July 15, 2009 7:41 AM