This is from Scott Horton’s new article in Harper’s on creating some kind of accountability for the torture conducted by the Bush administration (subscription required):
[I]n a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that the use of waterboarding to obtain intelligence was a “no-brainer.â€
Cheney at the time declined to refer to this practice as torture, preferring instead to describe it as “robust interrogation,†and that reluctance has been echoed in the press. I myself was twice warned by PBS producers, in advance of appearances on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, that I could use the word “torture†in the abstract but that I was to refrain from applying it to the administration’s policies. And after an interview with CNN in which I spoke of the administration’s torture policy, I was told by the producer, “That’s okay for CNN International, but we can’t use it on the domestic feed.â€
As always, the question remains: why is the major US media so incredibly left-wing?