NY Times Editorial: The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up

[markpkessinger]

(A personal note relating to the last paragraph of the editorial, which paragraph is included in the excerpt provided here: when President Obama, shortly after his election in 2008, said that he didn't "want to relitigate the previous eight years" and that he wanted to "Look forwards, not backwards," i made the observation at the time that a failure of the country to come to terms with all that had gone on under the previous administration would be the surest guarantee that we would remain mired in it. I wish I had been wrong about that.)

[font size=5]The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up[/font]
[font size=1]THE EDITORIAL BOARD MARCH 11, 2014[/font]

It was outrageous enough when two successive presidents papered over the Central Intelligence Agency’s history of illegal detention, rendition, torture and fruitless harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects. Now, the head of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, has provided stark and convincing evidence that the C.I.A. may have committed crimes to prevent the exposure of interrogations that she said were “far different and far more harsh” than anything the agency had described to Congress.

Ms. Feinstein delivered an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor today in which she said the C.I.A. improperly searched the computers used by committee staff members who were investigating the interrogation program as recently as January.

< . . . . >

Today, the C.I.A. director, John Brennan, denied hacking into the committee’s computers. But Ms. Feinstein said that in January, Mr. Brennan acknowledged that the agency had conducted a “search” of the computers. She said the C.I.A.’s inspector general had referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. “Besides the constitutional implications,” of separation of powers, she said, “the C.I.A.’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

< . . . . >

The lingering fog about the C.I.A. detentions is a result of Mr. Obama’s decision when he took office to conduct no investigation of them. We can only hope he knows that when he has lost Dianne Feinstein, he has no choice but to act in favor of disclosure and accountability.

[quinnox]

1. I guess it would have been too embarrassing for the U.S. to take a look at all of the abuses

and law violations of the Bush presidency, so Obama decided he wanted to "move on".

Hell, Obama took Bush's surveillance programs and ran with them, expanding them, and same with the drone war. Not sure that was what he meant by "hope and change" though.

[markpkessinger]

2. Exactly! n/t

[bemildred]

8. Lawsuits. War crimes. That's why. nt

[mike_c]

3. snowden went to russia, snowden went to russia....

Quick! Look over there! Snowden went to Russia!

[markpkessinger]

4. LOL! n/t

[mindwalker_i]

6. And don't forget the pole!

The one that he abandoned

[rhett o rick]

7. .

[Catherina]

9. And abandoned his ballerina...

[Enthusiast]

12. Don't forget Greenwald!

[ProSense]

15. Snowden is a liar. n/t

[LittleBlue]

16. Exactly

So transparent of them!

[Downwinder]

5. Too many trying to save face.

[Douglas Carpenter]

10. libertarians like Greenwald and Feinstein make me sick

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. Obama: “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/us/politics/12inquire.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

“And part of my job,” he continued, “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.”

[WillyT]

13. HUGE K & R !!!

[ProSense]

14. If the NYT

The Justice Department now has a criminal investigation to conduct, but the C.I.A. internal review and the Senate report must be released. Ms. Feinstein called on President Obama to make public the Senate report, which he has supported doing in the past. She said that this would “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.”

The lingering fog about the C.I.A. detentions is a result of Mr. Obama’s decision when he took office to conduct no investigation of them. We can only hope he knows that when he has lost Dianne Feinstein, he has no choice but to act in favor of disclosure and accountability.

...hadn't been complicit is whitewashing torture, the country would likely have reached this point years ago.

NY Times's excuse for not calling waterboarding "torture" doesn't hold water
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x361953

Reposting:

The Legacy Media And Torture

This blog, along with others, compiled some anecdotes and research to show how the New York Times had always called "waterboarding" torture - until the Bush-Cheney administration came along. Instead of challenging this government lie, the NYT simply echoed it, with Bill Keller taking instructions from John Yoo on a key, legally salient etymology. Now, we have the first truly comprehensive study of how Bill Keller, and the editors of most newspapers, along with NPR, simply rolled over and became mouthpieces for war criminals, rather than telling the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to calling it such 1.4 percent of the time. Had the technique changed? No. Only the government implementing torture and committing war crimes changed. If the US does it, it's not torture.

- more -

http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/06/the-legacy-media-and-torture/185284/

NY Times's excuse for not calling waterboarding "torture" doesn't hold water

<...>

The New York Times has now explained the reasoning behind its decision, and it's pretty surprising. The paper disputed the study's accuracy, but it gave Michael Calderone a statement acknowledging the shift and conceding that Bush administration entreaties were partly responsible:

"As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture," a Times spokesman said in a statement.

"When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture."

The Times' explanation is that once Bush officials started arguing that waterboarding wasn't torture, the only way to avoid taking sides was to stop using the word. But here's the problem: Not using the word also consitutes taking a side: That of the Bush administration.

That's because this debate wasn't merely a semantic one. It was occuring in a legal context.

- more -

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/07/times_excuse_for_not_calling_w.html

[Rex]

17. But but but...these things happened under the Dubya Era!

Aren't we supposed to just wipe the slate clean every election cycle and forget about any violations to the Constitution?

Clearly this is all the fault of Snowden and Ralph Nader!