Waterboarding Not Always Torture: U.S. Media

One man’s terrorist, an ancient and commonplace wisdom says, is another man’s freedom fighter. Whether or not torture is committed in the eyes of U.S. media depends on which war party mistreats its prisoners. This is certainly the impression left by a recently published study in April from the elite Harvard University.

Specifically, it is about waterboarding, a practice used during the Bush years. This means covering the mouths of pinned down people with a cloth and showering them with water, giving them the feeling of drowning. Journalist Christopher Hitchens impressively tested this method first-hand – and clearly defined it as torture.

Four Major U.S. Newspapers Investigated

The four most prominent U.S. newspapers, USA Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, all had double standards, according to the study. When non-American states used waterboarding, these newspapers described it as torture. If U.S. officials used this method, they avoided such attribution.

Since 2000, especially since 9/11 and the subsequent war against terrorism declared by U.S. President George W. Bush, this trend has increased drastically.

9/11 Reversed the Trend

Between 1930 and 1999, the New York Times labeled waterboarding torture in 81 percent of its reports, but between 2000 and 2008 in only 1.4 percent. According to the study, there were more than 150 articles about waterboarding published in two years.

Renowned Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan, originally an avowed supporter of the Iraq war, criticized his colleagues harshly for that. Instead of calling things what they were, the New York Times and other publications made themselves “megaphones for war criminals.”

Blog veteran Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com draws an equally bleak picture: “As always, the American establishment media is simply following in the path of the U.S. Government.”* As long as Washington criticized waterboarding by other countries, newspapers did too. When this changed, the editors simply adopted the new official language of the government.

Editor’s note:

*This quote, properly translated, could not be verified.