The New York Times Discovers Word ‘Torture’ in Its Dictionary, Dusts It Off

The Gray Lady’s new Executive
Editor Dean Baquet has made a major semantic decision that puts the
newspaper in compliance with what all Americans know: What the CIA
did to “some
folks” following Sept. 11 is “torture.” And after more than a
decade of avoiding the term, they will begin using “torture” to
describe certain techniques America has used during the
interrogation of prisoners.

Baquet writes:

When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation
was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency
did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a
specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the
methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted
that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of
“torture.” 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 C.I.A.’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. Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A.
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 paper has concluded that nobody is going to be punished for
the way prisoners were treated, which is horrible, but it is what
it is. In that sense, the legal definition of “torture” no longer
matters because nobody at the CIA is facing a trial or jail time
for what they’ve done. Instead, the debate is over whether torture
actually worked. Also, the president just said we
tortured people (though that admission is absent from Baquet’s
commentary).

In conclusion, at the urging of reporters, The New York
Times will now use the word “torture” to describe any incident
where they “know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a
prisoner in an effort to get information.”