The NY Times undermines its good account of the hunt for bin Laden by failing to call a torture technique "torture:"
As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture.
Sorry, NYT, but waterboarding was torture when used by the Spanish Inquisition; it was torture 500 years later when it was used by the Japanese in W.W. II; and it was torture when used in hte "war on terror" here. It did not become "un-torture" just because it was used by the United States under G.W. Bush.
I don't understand why the newspaper of record cannot plainly say that waterboarding is torture. Are they afraid of receiving tortured correspondence from Dick Cheney condemning them for writing this? Do they somehow believe the "jury is out" about whether torture is really torture? Are they concerned that Andrew Breitbart will have James O'Keefe will sneak into the Times office and prepare a heavily edited tape that somehow shows editors waterboarding writers or Paul Krugman waterboarding David Brooks?
What's next? This story?
A man blew up a Planned Parenthood Clinic yesterday in which critics have called a terrorist act. Supporters of the man, however, call it "Rescue of the Unborn."
You may want to go over to the Times and complain in a comment.