MB Civic

Greenwald on the media controversy over calling waterboarding “torture” pre and post Bush/Cheney…

Yesterday, the NYT’s own Brian Stelter examined this controversy and included a justifying quote from the paper’s Executive Editor, Bill Keller, that is one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I’ve seen from a high-level media executive in some time:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

Whether an interrogation technique constitutes “torture” is what determines whether it is prohibited by long-standing international treaties, subject to mandatory prosecution, criminalized under American law, and scorned by all civilized people as one of the few remaining absolute taboos. But to The New York Times’ Executive Editor, the demand that torture be so described, and the complaint that the NYT ceased using the term the minute the Bush administration commanded it to, is just tendentious political correctness: nothing more than trivial semantic fixations on a “term of art” by effete leftists

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