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Sunday, 14 February 2010 13:55 |
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Watering Torture Down Why are the media so happy to use the T word in a child-abuse case?
By Dahlia Lithwick
http://www.slate.com/id/2244307/
From the article:
“ What's appalling, then, about the dozens of eager media references to water-boarding in connection with the Tabor story is the willingness of the media to attach the words water-boarding and torture to Tabor's act of child abuse. Newspapers that have diligently limited themselves to calling water-boarding "enhanced interrogation" in the context of the Guantanamo detainees are suddenly ready to use the word now that a 4-year-old girl is involved.
ABC news, for instance, has largely used the words "harsh interrogation techniques" and "severe tactics" to describe water-boarding when it's done to American detainees. But the Joshua Tabor story that ran yesterday on ABC states that "the girl and the father admitted to the torture" and describes "the torture technique of waterboarding," with a link to another ABC story that quite deliberately avoids ever calling it torture. We are evidently only willing to call such conduct torture if it's applied to people we want to see as innocent.
.In a 2008 interview with Harper's Scott Horton, Professor Rejali warned of this very phenomenon. "I think we need to pay attention to our new culture of irresponsibility. We live now in an age where something is or is not torture depending on when and who it is done to," he said. "Zapping an angry businessman on an airplane cabin will be called torture, but zapping a foreigner might just be good security and completely excusable. This is bad." If we begin to think of water-boarding as scandalous as applied to some and perfectly justified when applied to others, we have just changed it from an illegal act of torture into a plausible menu selection.”
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Prosecution 
