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".