Sunday, March 15, 2009

A Day Late

On one hand I was pleased to hear Jackie Leyden interview Mark Danner on Sunday's ATC regarding his recent articles in the New York Review of Books and the NYT about the ICRC-documented evidence of torture ordered by the Bush administration and practiced by the CIA. On the other hand it's frustrating that NPR is again the Johnny-come-lately to a story of such importance - covering it only when it is safely established. As Danner notes in his NY Review of Books article, the story of US torture is nothing new - it's been sitting out there just waiting for serious reporting since late in 2002, citing part of an article from the WaPo in December 2002 and noting "A similarly lengthy report followed a few months later on the front page of The New York Times ('Interrogations: Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World')."

One can wish that NPR would follow up this long overdue report with information on the Convention Against Torture which, as Glenn Greenwald noted last month, the US signed under Reagan and ratified in 1994, and which obliges (with no exceptions allowed) the US government to investigate and prosecute any government officials who participated in or were complicit in torture. One can wish, eh?

5 comments:

Hubertg said...

NPR has been as reluctant to jump on this as they were about looking into the background on Dennis Blair, or anything else of this critical nature. Deep Throat investigation has gone the way of the Dodo Bird on NPR and has become a Bridge to Nowhere in this respect. The Silent Weapon is closing in. Welcome to The New World Order.

Buzztree said...

Danner's a little late to the party, too. See my article www.grimblebee.blogspot.com.

Anonymous said...

The fact that NPR for the past six years calls actions which, since the Spanish Inquisition, have been considered torture, to be "aggressive interrogation techniques" demonstrates that NPR was (is?) cowardly conforming to the GOP Bush White House's dishonest talking points.

Anonymous said...

NPR is again the Johnny-come-lately to a story of such importance - covering it only when it is safely established"

It's actually worse than that by far.

NPR ONLY reports on things like this when they can no longer avoid NOT reporting on it for fear of being called on "denying the crime".

In other words, it is no longer tenable to deny that waterboarding and other "extreme interrogation methods" occurred (because Bush officials including Cheney have admitted they OK'd them) nor is it tenable to deny that these are torture (again, because Bush officials have admitted as much).

So NPR has NO CHOICE but to "go on the record" at this point and acknowledge these things that no one can deny without looking like the total HACK (or is it quack?) ORGANIZATION that they have become.

This is nothing new.

This has become NPR's modus operandi.

geoff said...

Anonymous: That rings true. Did we, for instance, hear anything of the American in Isreal who, while peaceably protesting the Apartheid Wall, was shelled with a high-velocity tear gas canister and suffered critical head wounds, he may not survive?

No, instead, in what can only be considered a propagandist's in-joke, we're treated to a headline story of how cows (read, the public) align themselves with magnetic fields (propaganda.) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101945271