Under pressure from reporters and editors, the New York Times’ leadership has decided to use the word “torture” with regard to the CIA’s treatment of prisoners in the years following September 11.

Executive editor Dean Baquet published a statement on Thursday announcing the change in style, explaining that since we now know many more details of the CIA’s methods over the past decade – including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and caging prisoners in a box – the “plain-English” meaning of “torture” now outweighs the “specialized legal meaning” of the word.

The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods. But as we have covered the recent fight over the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program – which is expected to be the most definitive accounting of the program to date – reporters and editors have revisited the issue. Over time, the landscape has shifted. From now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.

Baquet justified the Times’ longstanding decision to shy from the word by saying that details of CIA practices have remained “murky” and “vague” for years. He also emphasized “the disputed legal meaning of the word” before saying that “today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute … and more on whether they worked.”

The Times has reported on CIA waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques since at least six years ago, largely using language such as “harsh interrogation” and “brutal treatment”. In 2009, the Times published an article titled “Explaining and Authorizing Specific Interrogation Techniques”, which drew on information as far back as 2002, and described physical abuse, “dietary manipulation”, “confinement with insects” and “walling” in detail, with extensive quotes from Justice Department documents. Many Times reports on CIA practices have pointed out that officials and critics “described [the techniques] as illegal torture”.



The Associated Press by and large uses specific descriptions of techniques and couches them with context, such as “The CIA voluntarily dropped the use of waterboarding, which has a long history as a torture tactic, from its arsenal of techniques after 2005.”

The Guardian does not have specific guidelines with regard to the use of the word, but nearly always prioritizes its common meaning – which Baquet concisely defines as when “interrogators [inflict] pain on a prisoner in an effort to gain information” – surrounded by context to make attendant details and issues as clear as possible.