by Andrew

In the latest release from those in the Bush administration and CIA who authorized and supported America's torture of prisoners of war, we get the following story today in the Washington Post. It details that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed gave up a wealth of information in the period after he was tortured by Cheney and Bush via the CIA. It does not and cannot prove that his information could not have been procured by legal or ethical interrogation methods. But what is interesting to me is the Washington Post's editorial and institutional position in favor of not calling waterboarding and sleep deprivation what they have always been called in every court of law and every society including the US in recent times: torture. They refuse to use the word "torture" for an act that is memorialized in Cambodia's museum of torture. That's how deeply the Washington Post is enmeshed in the pro-torture forces in Washington. The refusal to use this word is a clear, political act by the Post in defense of the Bush administration's torture and abuse policies. It places the Washington Post as an adjunct to the Bush-Cheney policy of torturing thousands of prisoners across every theater of war and across the globe.

For example, here's a classic couple of sentences where you have to strain to avoid the t-word:

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.

"Coercive methods". "Torment". Notice something missing? Now read the piece stripped of its Orwellian newspeak:

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of brutal torture sessions - he was shackled naked to maintain a stress position for a month, the shackles cutting into his wrists and forcing his feet to swell painfully, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, subjected to days and nights of loud noise and bright lights, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torture, he was not waterboarded again.

Now just imagine that we heard news that the soldier still captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan - mysteriously absent from the media since he went AWOL - had been subjected to these techniques. Do you believe that the Washington Post would not use the word "torture" to describe them? Of course they would. They have described John McCain's experience in Vietnam as torture, and yet what he endured was nothing like as brutal as what was done to KSM. Now check out the macho swaggering of Reuel Marc Berecht in the WSJ today, and Cheney's grandstanding on Fox tomorrow, and you see what the hard right, which now includes the Washington Post (having purged their only opinion columnist prepared to speak truth to torture power, Dan Froomkin), is doing.