Abstract
Why doesn't The New York Times use plain English when reporting the CIA's interrogation techniques?
In Washington DC the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is about to release portions of a 6,000-page report into the CIA's detention and interrogation practices since 2001. After 9/11 the Agency devised a highly classified programme which would enable them to kidnap terror suspects, fly them to secret jails around the world and extract much-needed information through “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and waterboarding. Soon enough, details of the programme were leaked to newspapers, forcing President George Bush to close the secret prisons and abandon the harshest: of the interrogation techniques.
More information gradually emerged revealing the brutal, violent reality of the CIA programme. Rights groups and some politicians started referring to “enhanced interrogation techniques” as torture, but government officials rejected their allegations, insisting the CIA had complied with the law in its treatment of prisoners. Mainstream print and cable news outlets also backed off from using “torture” to describe the savage tactics, preferring euphemisms like “harsh interrogation”. A 2010 study by Harvard students found that American media outlets, The New York Times and Washington Post among them, had routinely called waterboarding torture until the US government adopted the practice after 9/11. Then it became “enhanced interrogation”.
At a press conference in August, President Obama was quizzed about his decision to release the Senate's report. He told journalists: “We tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.” His remarks went viral, but it wasn't the first time that he had referred to the CIA's methods as “torture”. More striking was his use of “folks”, a grotesquely inappropriate term for the victims of torture, as if the CIA had waterboarded its prisoners over pizza and beer at a cosy American house party. Under international law, torture is absolutely forbidden and ranks with genocide and slavery as one of the worst crimes a state can commit. Small wonder, then, that Obama was mincing his words.
But his frank admission that “we tortured” sent ripples through the media. The New York Times' executive editor, Dean Baquet, soon came out with an editorial saying that the paper would henceforth apply the word “torture” to some instances of post-9/11 prisoner abuse.
For such an enormous and influential paper as the New York Times to choose plain truth over bland euphemism must surely be a move in the right direction, and the reporters who urged this shift deserve commendation. But, while the change in wording might be positive, note that the term will be used selectively. The reasons behind this are disturbing.
The editorial states that, when knowledge of the torture programme started to emerge a decade ago, details were “vague”. Bush's lawyers insisted “the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of torture”, so the Times “avoided a label that was still in dispute”. Fair enough, although the editorial pays too much respect to the Bush administration's legal rationale for torture, which first leaked to the press in 2004 and attracted widespread criticism at the time.
It continues, “Far more is now understood, such as that the CIA inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people's bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation.”
The idea that this has recently come to light is nonsense. The details here mentioned – the extensive waterboarding, the sleep deprivation, the box etc – have been known since 2009, when Obama disclosed four new “torture memos”. There was already sufficient evidence back then to ascertain that “enhanced techniques” constituted torture – Barack Obama himself described waterboarding as torture in 2009 – but the Times' news desk continued to reject that label in favour of legally neutral language like “brutality”. Not so the opinion pages, which featured a fierce editorial in 2009 calling for Bush officials to be investigated, impeached and, if necessary, prosecuted. Why has the paper changed its tune now, in 2014? The Senate Select Committee's report is said to contain details of shocking new abuses, which will probably make the Times' (and other outlets') refusal to use “torture” unsustainable and embarrassing. Moreover, Obama had effectively green-lighted the ‘t’ word when he said “we tortured”, although a free press should not need presidential approval before choosing its vocabulary.
The legal meaning of torture is secondary
The newspaper now claims that the Justice Department under both Bush and Obama “has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program”. So today, “the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked … In that context, the disputed legal meaning of the word ‘torture’ is secondary to the common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk.”
In other words, the American government has effectively decriminalized torture by refusing to prosecute those officials who devised and implemented the “enhanced interrogation program”. Torture, one of the most serious crimes of all, has now been emptied of its legal meaning and redefined as a policy choice. The paper accepts this unquestioningly, even though it flies in the face of American tradition, the rule of law, treaty obligations and international human rights standards. The Times, far from asserting its journalistic independence, will follow the government's lead.
The editorial makes a tenuous distinction between the legal and common sense meaning of “torture”. The paper's common sense definition – “the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk” – is too narrow. By this standard, acts of casual sadism, like the Abu Ghraib abuses, would presumably get a free pass, as would rape, cruel punishments, and other instances of gratuitous brutality. By confining torture to intelligence-gathering, the Times implies that, even where US agents abused prisoners, they were still acting with the noble intent of extracting information to “save American lives”. President Obama said, at the recent press conference, that we should not “feel too sanctimonious” towards the American torturers as they were “real patriots” doing a “tough job”. That might excuse US officials in the eyes of many Americans, and help swallow Obama's decision not to prosecute, but there is no exemption in the relevant laws for “patriots doing a tough job”: the ban on torture is absolute.
The Times' definition would also exclude force-feeding of the sort now being conducted at Guantanamo Bay, supposedly to keep hunger-striking prisoners alive (not to obtain information). The feeding involves painful medical procedures and violent cell extractions, denounced by the United Nations as torture. But if torture is defined solely in terms of intelligence gathering, then the force-feeding would not qualify. This plays into the hands of the Obama administration as it fights hunger-striking prisoners in the courts.
The so-called “common meaning” has become ubiquitous thanks to US television dramas, such as 24, and Hollywood movies, such as Zero Dark Thirty, which saw a sharp rise in depictions of “common sense” torture by the “good guys” post-9/11, and in which torture always elicits vital information thanks to which American lives are saved. According to the rights group Human Rights First, there were 42 scenes of torture on primetime television in 2000; by 2003 that number had risen to 228.
Torture, as defined by American and international law, reflects common sense more clearly than the Times' restricted reading. So the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the US has ratified, defines torture as “severe pain or suffering” inflicted not just to obtain information, but for such purposes as “punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind”.
So the editorial is wrong to separate the legal from the common sense meaning of “torture”: they are closely linked. By contrast, the word “abuse” has a variety of meanings, such as physical assault, verbal bullying, sexual harassment, or torture. Similarly, “killing” can mean murder, but it can also refer to the lawful taking of life by soldiers or policemen. Torture, however, is literally a crime, like murder, and any attempt to deny this is amoral. If the paper defined rape as “coercive sexual violence intended to gratify the assailant”, eschewing its legal meaning, there would surely be outrage.
While the Times might shy away from applying torture as a legal term, others, including the United Nations, numerous rights groups, former Bush officials, the International Committee of the Red Cross, along with Obama and his own attorney general, have not. The paper could easily decry the “enhanced techniques” as torture, legally understood, and do so on good authority.
Of course the paper has often described the actions of foreign governments as torture. Last year the Times carried a story reporting that Human Rights Watch had documented extensive evidence of torture in Syria (the word was used freely throughout). Now compare that story to another piece from 2012, which describes a Human Rights Watch report into the CIA's torture and rendition of Libyan dissidents. By contrast, the reporters almost entirely avoid the word “torture”, even though Human Rights Watch accused the CIA of torture and called for accountability. While the Times often refers to the practices of foreign governments as torture, understood legally, it has explicitly decided not to refer to US government policy in this way.
No coverage of American war crimes
It was striking that, days after Mr Baquet's editorial, Amnesty International released a landmark report documenting probable American war crimes, including torture, in Afghanistan. The Times offered no coverage of the report, even though other outlets, such as the Washington Post and The Daily Beast, quickly featured the story. Irate readers wrote in to the paper to complain, prompting the Times' public editor, Margaret Sullivan, to issue an explanation. She accepted that the Times should have covered the report, especially given the paper's recent u-turn on torture, but claimed that details in Amnesty's investigation were known already.
She cited two UN reports, both concerning torture in Afghanistan, which bore no relation to Amnesty's findings. While the UN reports focused on abuses committed by Afghans, Amnesty gave credible evidence of American war crimes, and of the military's failure to investigate. It is true that some of this material had already been covered, most thoroughly by Matthieu Aikins in an award-winning expose for Rolling Stone. But the Times did not feature Aikins' story at all, even though he revealed some of the worst American atrocities of the Afghan war. One is left with the impression that the Times is happy to cover the crimes of little brown foreigners, but not the abuses of Uncle Sam.
The paper has a history of pandering to the American government. It beefed up George W Bush's case for war in Iraq with bogus stories about weapons of mass destruction. Then, in 2004, it succumbed to pressure from the White House and spiked a story about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of Americans. The article was only published a year later because James Risen, one of the reporters, was planning to include the revelations in a book. Maybe the paper agrees with Richard Nixon, who famously said that, “When the President does it, that means it's not illegal.” Or that Americans are the good guys, no matter what they do.
The Times deserves credit for revising its language and, even before Mr Baquet's editorial, used the t-word more frequently than the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, as a 2012 study by ReThink Media showed. But the reasons given for the paper's volte-face on torture stink of sophistry and serve, primarily, to gratify US government officials accused of grave crimes. A free press is supposed to remain independent of government influence, but the Times has dutifully fallen into line. The new policy on torture says less about the meaning of the word, and more about the media's timidity and political subservience.
(I emailed the New York Times to request comment for this piece, but received no reply to my message).