Reply #7: Time Magazine Conflates Destroyed Torture Tapes, 'Conspiracy Theorists' [View All]

[L. Coyote]

This story is about the grossest and most inhumane of human behaviors, the people who perpetrated such acts, those who lied to cover it up, those who destroy evidence, and the continuing obstruction of evidence. Add the very legitimacy of a war, the lies to go to war, the millions and millions of people affected by that war, hundreds of thousands of people killed by the very same torturers.

All I can say about those who want this issue to be about the Honorable Speaker of the House is that there is one place worse than Time Magazine on this score, and that is DU. Here, the whole matter seems condensed into an exercise at Dem bashing and an examination of whether or not Pelosi should now be impeached. Way worse than Time, if not an exercise is staring at one's own navel and not realizing the rest of the body exists. They are a bunch of damn "conspiracy theorists" in the worst sense of the phrase, either completely looney and engrossed with their navels or doing the bidding of the war mongers to help cover up the immensity of this moment in history and the seriousness of the crimes.

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Time Magazine Conflates Destroyed Torture Tapes, 'Conspiracy Theorists'
By Dark Wraith - 08 Dec 2007 - http://uncapitalist.com/blog/?itemid=1608


Referring to the tapes the CIA destroyed of men being tortured by American interrogators, the title of the Time magazine story on the matter is thus: "The Destroyed Tapes: A Boon for Conspiracy Theorists."

Isn't that just special?! The principal crime is torture; the subsequent crime is destruction of the incontrovertible evidence; and the continuing crime is obstruction of justice in not revealing the existence of the tapes, and then not disclosing their destruction. With all of that as backdrop, Time magazine's editors—noses high in the air of preening respectability—frame the whole, monstrously ugly story as the essential nourishment for all those loony 'conspiracy theorists' out there.

In their faux appearance of objectivity, these same mainstream news media outlets—and not just Time—make little or no effort in their own voices to roundly debunk the utterly ridiculous claim by CIA Director Michael Hayden that the video tapes had to be destroyed lest they be leaked and imperil the lives of the torturers who were filmed executing their craft. Instead, the media uniformly leave that task to quotes by outraged Democrats, thereby framing the matter as a politicized controversy rather than as a pattern of criminal acts that, taken as a whole, constitute a conspiracy in the legal sense of that term, a term Time has ensured carries in the matter the lack of seriousness with which "conspiracy theorists" should be taken.

The august editorial ranks of the mainstream media notwithstanding, however, civil and criminal proceedings are likely to result on the separate acts as well as on the acts as part of an overall scheme: ..............