Tick Tick Tick

(click here for graphic source)

For a long time NPR news has minimized (June 2006), dismissed (February 2007), ignored (April 2007), covered over (October 2007), and collaborated with (December 2007) the use of torture by agencies and agents of the US government. You can search NPR news in vain for any original investigative work on exposing torture or on any serious elucidation of the laws and conventions that prohibit the US from committing torture and require prosecution for violators.

Yesterday and today feature NPR continuing its function of justifying and sanitizing the US torture regime. On Monday's ATC, Alex Spielgel provides a long and sympathetic venue to torture psychologist and apologist Bryce Lefever. I posted this brief critique on NPR's website:

Norris says Spiegel is letting Lefever offer a "different view"? Different from what? When has NPR offered a thorough investigative critique of the war crimes committed by Lefever and his cohorts? NPR can barely even use the word torture when it covers these crimes. Norris also sees no irony in mentioning that Lefever went to work at Bagram in 2002 (that was a pleasant time there!).


It doesn't surprise me that liars and sadists like Lefever did what they did. What is disgusting is how NPR and other "news" outlets aided and abetted these torturers through refusing to report, cover and investigate the torture story that was breaking as early as 2002. And now NPR insults us by offering a "different view"? What a sad excuse for journalism...uggghhh.

Then on Tuesday morning Dina Temple-Raston is on to critique what Steve Inskeep describes as "the strongest argument for torture...the ticking time bomb scenario...." This is interesting, to say the least, since NPR has been a promoter of this argument before. As it turns out the report is not much of a critique.

Temple-Raston's strongest critic is CIA-award-winning terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman who states that "I've personally been told that they happen...but I have to admit...I've become increasingly skeptical...." To his credit he notes that the ticking time bomb scenario "becomes a default assumption, which in turn...becomes a legitimization or justification for torture...I've yet to see an actual documented case independently of what I was told."

Not a bad start, but in the ever shifting world of NPR moral relativism we have to get the "other side" on this one. Who better than a former member of the torture organization itself, former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who we get to hear claim, "I happen to know at least through 2004 these activities were very productive, broke up plots aimed at our allies, and aimed against the domestic United States." Finally we are told that Michael Hayden claims torture produced good intelligence, while the FBI claims that's not true.

One of the most striking features of NPR's coverage of the torture issue is how rarely the featured "experts" are human rights or international law advocates or experts. Instead they are usually members or former members of various US government agencies - frequently of the very ones implicated in formulating and carrying out torture. Why is the flimsy "ticking time bomb" given a place of prominence and treated as worthy of debate? Why isn't the role of torture as an assault on the rule of law considered, or the way in which US torture is typical of all occupiers and imperialists, or the fact that most tortured detainees are innocent? Who decided that the only legitimate questions are whether torture "works" or what situations make it okay. NPR's framing of the "debate" gives legitimacy to torture and decontextualizes its historic role as a repulsive and pornographic tool of state terror which always falls most heavily on those who have done nothing but resist the repressive actions of the torture state.

Velvet Gloves

This morning Ari Shapiro talks with Benjamin Wittes (of the Brookings Institute - ugh) about the "need" for new laws to codify detention in the eternal GWOT. It's a brilliantly repulsive interview in which the entire sham of the "War on Terror" is accepted and extolled - and in which the US is the exceptional nation, blessed with the responsibility for waging this "war" exclusive of any international laws or obligations.

Here's a taste of the interview:

• Shapiro: "So it needs to be a new set of laws crafted by Congress. Describe what those laws would look like."
• Wittes: "In a military conflict in which, you know, Congress has authorized the use of force against an enemy that has declared war against the United States, the nature of that conflict necessitates some kind of a detention authority, that is a detention power that is not connected to necessarily a pending indictment in US Federal court."
• Shapiro: "And so when you say a detention authority, you mean conceivably for that person's lifetime."
• Wittes: "You know one would hope that it would never have to go on that long but you know there are a certain group of people that you're going to be holding for a very long time."
• Shapiro (interjecting one vague critique): "If as you propose, Congress creates a system of military commissions or national security courts...human rights groups say that opens the door to harsh interrogations, secret evidence, and things that the US really doesn't and shouldn't condone."
• Wittes: Responds that though he has "a lot of sympathy with a lot of human rights groups complaints," he is "a little bewildered" by critiques of his proposals. Given how extremely bad the current system is he just can't understand how his own authoritarian system is "retrogressive."

Listening to these two, you'd never know that there is something called International Law which is meant to prevent just this kind of legal morass in which the most powerful nation makes up the rules that only it is allowed to follow and which only it gets to enforce. It's easy to find information on international laws (unless one is committed to US exceptionalism) : the American Society on International Law, the UN, and the Red Cross for example.

I'm struck by how often NPR turns to these soft-authoritarian types like counterinsurgency promoters and torture apologists. In many ways they are a perfect fit for NPR news which also promotes, celebrates, and justifies the iron fist of US military, economic, and political hegemony in the world, but always with a velvet touch.