The NYT And The T-Word:
The front-page piece in the NYT today on Obama's thorny task in staffing the CIA, after seven years of its violation of the Geneva Conventions, is revealing in many ways. Like many in the MSM, the NYT cannot bring itself to describe the techniques that the CIA has used as "torture." And yet we know that the CIA has tortured prisoners under the plain legal definition of torture, and we know that this was the whole point of giving the CIA explicit legislative permission for this in 2006. No doubt some of the techniques only rise to the level of abuse and not the "severe" mental or physical pain and suffering standard for torture. But we know that many go and have consistently gone beyond this under Bush and Cheney - and that that line was deliberately blurred or rendered meaningless by a hired gun like John Yoo. The reason many of us opposed John Brennan was because of his documented ambivalence about exactly this: the use of abuse and torture as weapons in interrogation and his enmeshment with George Tenet when Tenet authorized war crimes. The NYT, however, did not cite the actual reasons we opposed him or the quotes that disturbed us, and explains it as a function of "the left". The piece also allows Brennan to characterize himself as an opponent of abuse and torture, when the record clearly shows something much more ambiguous.
In fact, the only time the word "torture" is used in the NYT piece is to describe techniques practised by other countries. This is an important point because it shows how the NYT is now actively deceiving its readers about this matter.
6:48 PM
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