All Aboard

First, let's be clear.

Waterboarding is torture.

It's torture under the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), by which the U.S. is bound; it's torture under U.S. law. It's also been declared torture by President Obama in a policy banning it.

Under the CAT, there are no exceptions or excuses for torture -- saying that it "was only used those three times" or "only used for the greater purpose of getting intelligence about terrorists' plans" does not excuse it.

All of these points stand -- yet the selective and tendentious use of them in an attack on the liberal media by leftwing pundits both undermines their own credibility as universalists and opens up disturbing prospects for just what they intend to do to replace the liberal media.

There's a frenzy of progressives making the most outrageous attacks on the New York Times' Bill Keller, and by extension, the whole liberal media establishment.

A 20-page study of the use of waterboarding over a century pushes toward a conclusion: that the media deliberately shifted its use of the term "torture" to describe attempts to simulate drowning of victims in subservience to Dick Cheney's interpretation of this practice during the Bush Administration. As Andrew Sullivan notes:

"But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact, recognized by everyone on the planet as such - and by the NYT in its news pages as such - for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right."

No, we don't have anything of the sort.

In fact, the recognition that waterboarding is torture, even if it ought to be universal, is far from acknowledged by "everybody on the planet" -- Sullivan has an endearing way of assuming his liberal networks are "everybody". To see this isn't the case one can look at the yahoos on Yahoo AP story comments -- or go further. One can look all around the world -- at many countries where waterboarding is routinely practiced, and without any public outcry; to complain would be to risk winding up as one of the waterboarded.

Obviously, when the Times wrote about torture in other countries, they found it to be a more loathsome phenomenon than they found it to be when practiced by their own government -- a natural if myopic human instinct, whether the progressives find it so or not, and one that was based on a pragmatic feel for the *degree* to which the practice was harmful. The Harvard study in fact shows that newspaper writers referred to the torture of blacks on the South in the U.S. with this term, so the bloggers' scolding of the Times over the "Cheney gap" doesn't quite work. Writers like Andrew Sullivan take the shift to mean "liberal editors pulled their punches because they had caved to Bush." But they could also simply be persuaded in their news judgement that *this form* of the practice wasn't as bad. That's a harder conclusion to draw -- and it would force bloggers to use reason and logic rather than harassment to convince us that waterboarding is indeed torture.

The problem isn't just a disagreement about severity or intensity and what you call it, however. The charge being made by Andrew Sullivan as well as the progressive new media influencers like Dan Gillmor is that the U.S. mainstream media ("old media") deliberately refrained from using the word "torture" to describe this practice, and did so because it was "subservient" to the Bush Administration.

This stampede of bloggy moral outrage is being directed mainly at Bill Keller, because he decided to stand up to the charges, both through the Times' ombudsman and in his own words. He explained that the Times doesn't justify the practice, but because it's a contentious topic, the Times refrains itself from characterizing the practice, but has various sources speak using various terms, i.e. human rights activists are quoted as saying "it's torture"; Bush Administration officials are quoted as saying its a "harsh interrogation technique".

Not content with pluralism on a subject where they view themselves as having assumed the moral high ground, Scott Horton and others find this the worst sort of moral depravity, and are likening the euphemistic language of the Times to an Orwellian propagandistic act in service of a sinister American regime.

I cry foul on this, because I think you have to save the term "Orwellian" in its context for the regimes of the Soviet Union and the Nazi and their latter-day equivalents, and not the U.S. -- a country that despite the past president's despicable authorization of this torturous practice, was able to elect a subsequent president who has outlawed the practice.

Look, ask this man, whether he would rather be in a Chinese prison or an American prison right now.

Bill Keller may not be a paragon of virtue, but in his professional role, he represents a mainstream liberal consensus regarding how the news should be reported -- which is *pluralistically*.

That's what's most offensive to the hard left and the progressives, who want to ascribe -- force upon -- the media a social justice role, have it articulate only one truth, and have it lead society as a moral force instead of merely a reporting force in which readers are allowed to draw conclusions on their own after sifting through different facts and opinions.

Bill Keller is no Orwellian; it's atrocious to use this kind of hyperbolic and malicious language about someone who is managing a platform for debate, not playing the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. He appears to believe sincerely that he hasn't injected partisan spirit into this management; his critics claim that by choosing not to use the term "torture" in the editorial voice of the Times, he has already chosen a side, and already committed a grave immoral act.

I'd prefer that the Times use the term "torture" as a factual and legal term -- but then, I'd also like Reuters to man up and use "terrorist" about people who blow other people into smithereens instead of calling them "militants".

The Harvard study that started this round of culture war from the left is somewhat slight -- it is 20 pages, and prepared by students. It has a kind of literalist bean-counting feel to it precisely because it is selective in its target -- only American newspapers are reviewed, and only the question of waterboarding and its description are evaluated, without much detail on what the various practices constituted.

While waterboarding as a term has only been used since 2004, the study goes back 100 years to find similar practices, with varying terminologies, yet doesn't explore the distinctions about the nature of the practice in its context -- as to severity, as to whether it was systematic in nature, and as to whether there was a remedy for it. Those contexts don't excuse torture; they do explain a motivation for Times' editors that isn't on the axis of evil, however.

While showing American journalists as changing their usage, the students don't examine whether in fact this was an actual editorial decision reached by a deliberative process after 2004 (I don't think they could show that) -- in fact, they and those tweeting their link want to bypass that deliberative process and change the practices of these newspapers by force, through shaming.  Evidently they hope by showing a moral slide into fudging the naming of this practice, they can make liberal newspapers uncomfortable enough through public browbeating to change their usage.

That's a process I would call "collectivism" and I think it has no place in the relationship between journalism and the public.

While people who study human rights issues more thoroughly as a profession might have found all the domestic and international legal arguments -- and field studies and case histories -- very persuasive, a typical newspaper editor -- let alone reader! -- will not have gone through that process. "Torture" -- like "terrorist" -- is a word that feels like a scare word that might easily lead itself to tendentious use -- Bill Keller likely looks at this more as a literary and journalistic problem than a legalistic one.

If the Times or anyone were to have a deliberative process, and think freely, they'd have to be free to think through and debate various propositions, among which would be those mounted by the Bush Administration and some thinkers that the use of torture was limited and was for a greater good. For the sake of a free debate, that immoral proposition would have to have legitimacy as a proposition in the way, as Karl Popper and other champions of the open society have said; any false proposition or hypothesis one believes to be true but might be false, would have a right to existence.

The shriekers calling Bill Keller a Nazi, however, don't have patience for persuasion; they want instant propagandistic effect. They don't have time for this debate, or this form of a debate -- but that's the debate people will have anyway, in bars and at kitchen tables even if the Times comments won't stay open long enough. To select but one of numerous comments in this vein, this one from Huffington:

I wonder if liberals are as stupoid as they sound on their posts? I'll let a professional waterboard me if you let him put cigarrettes out on your arm and hit you over the head with an ashtray.

And in the end, *like Obama* (!) what may likely result from this deliberation from the Times is that they will conclude pragmatically -- politically -- that while reprehensible, the use of this practice of torture was "not so bad" or "justified". That will not really serve the cause -- but then, serving the human rights cause is not really what Dan Gillmor and others were about here.

If the charge that the American media is "subservient" is to stick, such a study would have to look at lots of issues -- what are the words used to report on date rape or the sexual escapades of public officials? What are the terms used for abortion and reproductive rights? And how are these issues covered by newspapers in Spain, Russia, Sweden, or the UK?

This particular project, however, like the project of Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, seems to be more simplistic: to show how the liberal media purportedly caved to Bush, couldn't do its job and -- and here's where the implication comes in -- needs to be replaced by some other thing that will do it better.

That's the part that rings the warning bells for me -- and warnings that do indeed lead us toward Orwell. Gillmor quotes Mandela about the South African apartheid-era press, trying to apply it to the U.S. today on this issue of torture, saying:

“A bad free press is preferable to a technically good subservient press."

What we have with the American media is a disagreement about which term to use to describe a practice this liberal media condemns. What we don't have here is a "bad" free press nor a "subservient" press -- the record of criticism on the Bush as well as the Obama administrations stand (and Dan Gillmor is more worried about the former than the latter).

I first caught sight of this debate on twitter from Craig Newmark, linking to Gillmor, who is linking to Glen Greenwald, and I asked him, "OK, what press do you think is 'subservient'?" thinking the topic had to be about the war in Afghanistan or something. He demurred, and sent me back to his links -- chicken. Of course, as a Silicon Valley Influencer -- one of the top tech makers and users of social media who use their advantageous positions in social media to push a progressive agenda -- he wanted to push the message, but not really debate it.

Gillmor was only slightly better when I challenged him -- first claiming I was improperly "reading his mind" when I said he seemed to want the media to push the progressive agenda rather than be pluralistic -- then saying that in fact he had definitely used the term "Orwellian" on purpose. That's awful. Orwell criticized Nazi German and Soviet propaganda and their fellow-travellers in Europe -- Bill Keller and other editors and writers who haven't done as the progressives demand aren't Nazis or Soviets or fellow-travellers. *They're just liberals*. And *that* is their crime, not moral depravity around the use of a term -- the Influencers want to destroy not only the old media business, based on commercial, capitalist interests, but destroy its diversity of opinion and freedom, replacing it with directed "crowd sourcing" which amounts to a mob -- a mob they set the tone for at the top of their massive lists of followers and retweeters.

If the progressives *really* wanted the media to remain free, they wouldn't castigate Keller for his defense, claiming that his effort to be neutral is in fact a chosing of a nefarious side.

If you think I'm just ranting about geeks again, have a look at what Dan Gillmor believes are *already* the "new rules" for media that he strenuously advocates. They involve contorting the media into an instrument of revolutionary power, browbeating people believed to be "lying" into "telling the truth"; outing anonymous sources believed to be lying; and using other coercive tactics. It's creepy.

Just about every one of these 22 precepts is problematic for a free press, as I explain in my other 3dblogger.typepad.com post on the media.

Dan Gillmor gets especially gleeful with his "gotcha" of Keller when he is writing on the Soviet Union, where he was Moscow bureau chief for the Times and quotes another blogger who:

cites numerous news articles written by the very same Bill Keller, when he was a NYT reporter, in which he applied the Tendentious P.C. term "torture" to interrogation techniques used by the Soviet Union despite the fact that the Soviet government insisted that such techniques were not "torture" under the law.  He used the term "torture" for other foreign governments as well, despite those government's denials.  As the site notes:  "In his own foreign reporting, Keller didn't bother to clutter his stories with the obvious -- and irrelevant -- denials by Soviet and South African government officials that they were engaged in torture.  He used his own judgment to recognize torture for what it was."

As always in comparing various countries -- as people do, and as they have a right to -- the questions of scale, severity and ability to find remedy all come into play.

We've found remedies to the practice of torture by our country. Russia hasn't.

What is this really about, besides the "project for a new media" that Gillmor has always been about? (He hasn't written about torture in other countries that I can see before he took up this subject as a lens into what he sees as the moral depravity of the mainstream liberal media -- oh, perhaps, like others on the left, he's written something on Iran, which is newly fashionable as a human rights topic -- for people who didn't find it so 10 years ago.)

So, I think it's mostly about that "revolutionary struggle" -- a struggle that, were they to name it really what it was, and be truthful about the coercion they plan to enforce it, wouldn't have as many people showing up to retweet it so avidly.

And it's also about surrogate advocacy -- a hitting of an alternative target when you can't or won't hit the direct target. Obama is the problem here; for reasons of political pragmatism, he chose not to prosecute those found to sanction torture in U.S. custody and to "move on". The Silicon Valley Influencers seem wary of attacking the president they helped get elected, because that might isolate him -- and them. So they go after other pillars of the community like the New York Times that they can mercilessly -- and endlessly -- beat up with impunity -- never having to solve the larger problem of how you get American opinion to move on this subject.

Clearly, when we read Dan's 22 rules for media (*shudder* -- something I think would never be accepted as an oped piece at the Times because it's too wacky and tendentious), we realize that he earnestly believes that if he just shows up, on Mitch Kapor's or Knight-Rider's dime, and says something loud enough and retweetable enough, that it will become doctrine. "Everybody on the planet" will believe it, as Andrew Sullivan winsomely described it.

The problem is that once you get out of the bubble of Dan's blog, or the Times "highlighted comments" following one of Dan's 22 rules, you find that public opinion is more practical -- and brutally logical. The first comment on this story about Obama's failure to prosecute the sanctioners of torture is indicative; while condemning the practice, the reader -- a woman -- believes that what terrorists have done to civilians is far worse, and that because we are dealing with a ruthless enemy, she believes, we are forced to be as ruthless. This anti-Geneva Conventions perspective is widespread; not a single one of the prominent human rights leaders now in office in the Obama administration, or Obama himself, have been able to do a thing about it.

It's here Gillmor doesn't have an answer -- the progressives never do. They airily talk about policing -- and UN policing. Perhaps even here he would even simply invoke his news rule-- the one on convincing people that anecdotal incidents like terrorist attacks causing them to have fears weren't really systematic.