NY Times Responds to FAIR Alert on Torture

[Robbien]

. . .

Wrote Whitney in an e-mail message, "Now that you tell me people are reading things into our not using 'torture' in headlines, I’ll pay closer attention."

Personally, I was torn – until a conversation I had last week with a reader from Germany. Absent any clear definition, I felt, it seemed reasonable to use "abuse" if it helped keep temperatures down, much as the use of “militant” instead of "terrorist" in the Palestine-Israel conflict suggests a sometimes misplaced wish neither to take sides nor to be inflammatory (many supporters of Israel feel very differently about this, and I expect to address the specific issue in a future column).

But just as a terrorist is sometimes, in fact, a terrorist, torture is inescapably torture. The reader who moved me out of the muddled center on this did it with a simple question: "If the same things had been done to American prisoners by Iraqi authorities, would The Times have hesitated to use ‘torture’ over and over again?"

http://www.fair.org/activism/times-torture-update.html

NYT is playing innocent by saying it didn't think there was anything wrong by using the word abuse when talking about the torture. The NYT also didn't answer FAIR's original complaint that the NYT implicitly endorsed the WH's stance that no torture was committed.