The Pusillanimous Press

Just this morning on National Public Radio they were talking about Osama's driver having been subjected to "harsh interrogation techniques that some consider torture." The New York Times described the techniques as "coercive." I haven't been able to establish the nature of the harshness or coercion, but I want to say this as someone who once tried to report the news honestly: If we're talking about waterboarding here, it's torture. It's torture! Not maybe torture, not possibly torture, not torture in the view of some. Every description of this "technique" points out that its victims feel like they're dying. It reduces them to blind panic. Nobody can endure it for more than a matter of seconds. And I want to tell you goddamned cowardly editors that when so-called interrogators make people feel like they're dying, that's torture. If you can't see that simple truth and have the courage to say so then you don't deserve to be in a position of public trust—a trust that is rapidly and rightly diminishing. I've been ashamed of journalism as a whole for something like twenty years now, but never more ashamed than I am about this.

Update: Found in the Christian Science Monitor that the techniques included sleep deprivation and solitary confinement. The latter would not be considered torture in common parlance. Sleep deprivation is pretty agonizing, according to people who've been subjected to it. In this regard, the word "coercive" may be appropriate. May.

Personally, it's persuasive to me that the best experts on interrogation say that inflicting any form of discomfort on a person only motivates them to tell you what you want to hear. And the use of any of this stuff is just a little too Orwellian for me to countenance. One-Twenty-Oh-Nine, baby, and let's hope we can undo some of the damage starting the next day.