Torture and the Media

[L. Coyote]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Torture-and-the-Media-by-Rory-OConnor-090429-585.html

.... What I seek most from opinion columnists is consistency, and Friedman, consistent and persistent in his excuse making for the powerful, never disappoints in this regard.

Thus it was no surprise to find him hailing in a recent column Barack (“Split the baby”) Obama’s “torturous compromise” to expose, but not prosecute, those responsible for violating our Constitution and international law by torturing in our names.

Friedman accurately noted, “more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.” Nevertheless, he justified the “Obama compromise” and failure to prosecute by offering two reasons not to go after the evildoers: “the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart; and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.”


Why Friedman and his ilk fear that prosecuting senior officials who break the law will “rip our country apart” more than their having ignored the law, the Constitution and any conceivable standard of basic morality is best left to him, his shrink and his God. But Friedman’s apologia – which recognizes that, “yes, people among us who went over the line may go unpunished” but concludes, “because we still have enemies who respect no lines at all,” Obama is doing his “best” in an “ugly war” by letting the torturers go unpunished – is but the latest in a long line of journalistic defenses of torture by well-paid, prize-winning and access-granted mainstream journalists. ...........

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CIA Ordered to Turn Over Details of Pre-Torture Memo Interrogation Tapes
Written by Jason Leopold
Sunday, 26 April 2009 - http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/866.html?task=view

The CIA must turn over by Wednesday a detailed description of the contents of interrogation tapes the agency made as early as April 2002, four months before the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that authorized the agency to subject a “high-value” detainee to “enhanced interrogation” techniques, a federal judge has ordered.

In a two-page order dated April 20, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein set an April 29 deadline for the government to produce a schedule as to when and how it intends to turn over materials related to the destruction of 92 interrogation tapes, including the contents of videotapes made prior to August 2002.

Hellerstein said “the government shall produce records relating to the content of the tapes not merely from August 2002, but from the entire period the tapes were destroyed.”

“The Government represents this period to be April through December 2002,” Hellerstein’s order says. “In addition to the current plan for production from a sample month, the Government shall propose a schedule for production of documents from the entire period. The Government shall produce documents relating to the destruction of the tapes, which describe the persons and reasons behind their destruction, from a period reasonably longer than April through December 2002.”