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It all depends who says and does it

At The Daily Dish Andrew Sullivan in a piece "The NYT And Torture: The Double Standard Deepens" picks up on how The New York Times has written about Eileen Nearne in an obit - as compared to how the Times usually writes about what can only be described as torture.

"John F Burns pens a wonderful obit today on the remarkable British spy in France, Eileen Nearne, in 1944 who was tortured by the Nazis. Somehow, Bill Keller let the following paragraph slip through the copy-edit cracks:

As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen.

"Tortured"? Doesn't that break the NYT rule that such techniques are only referred to as "harsh interrogation techniques"? Has the policy changed? Or are we seeing an explicit decision by its editors to use different terms for exactly the same things when used by the US, rather than by the Nazis? You think I'm exaggerating? Here is an eye-witness account of Camp Nama, under the direct command of General Stanley McChrystal, where mere suspects - people not even caught red-handed as Ms Nearne was by the Nazis - were imprisoned and tortured."

Continue reading here.

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