The staff of the New York Times has done some great reporting on the Bush administration’s torture policies. But there is something absurd about the paper’s internal debate over how to describe what the U.S. did to Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners. Public editor Clark Hoyt recounts the discussions that led to the chosen word of the moment, “brutal”:
The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed.
A week later, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.
“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word.
These discussions presume there is a public debate over whether waterboarding is harsh or brutal or torture. But there isn’t a genuine debate at all: it’s obvious that it’s all of those things. The reason the wording is in dispute is classic Orwell: Dick Cheney and others claim that torture is useful in defending American interests and lives, but U.S. and international law ban torture. So the U.S. must torture but call it something else. So we don’t torture. By failing to call torture by its true name, the Times and other media outlets lend legitimacy to a rhetorical scam.
This is an interesting journalism question. A group of public officials – whose record of honesty and credibility on national security matters is already in considerable doubt – insists that torture is not torture but something else. Even if they’re sincere in their assertions that “enhanced interrogation” is key to defeating terrorism, self interest is also key motivation for this stance: they don’t want to be prosecuted for war crimes and don’t want their legacy tarnished. Yet the media establishment feels it must avoid weighing the context and motivations behind these improbable linguistic acrobatics, and so cannot make a rather straightforward judgment.
I can see the reasoning, and Hoyt spells it out: if you start calling torture torture, a lot of people will get mad at you and accuse you of liberal bias. You’re also strongly implying someone has committed a crime, which will stir up even more outrage and perhaps have legal implications. Still, I think these problems have to be weighed against a paper’s basic obligation to tell its readers the truth, and not filter information with euphemisms coined to obscure the truth. By dancing endlessly around the question of whether “brutal” = “torture,” media outlets are only damaging their own credibility.
