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Torture was the Story of the Day. The Justice Department published internal legal memoranda delivered to Central Intelligence Agency spies granting them permission to use brutal tactics during interrogation. Neither the memos nor network reporters actually called the techniques torture by name, it should be noted, relying instead on euphemism or attributed speech. Although the CIA story attracted the most time, it was not chosen as the lead on any of the three newscasts. ABC teased it at its intro as the lead but used a story about real estate foreclosures instead--for technical rather than editorial reasons. Both NBC and CBS really did bury the lead, as the saying goes: CBS chose Barack Obama's diplomacy in Mexico City, NBC economic indicators of continuing recession.

Shackled in a way to keep you are awake for one week…Placed in a cramped confinement box with an insect…Repeatedly subjected to the terror of death by drowning…Slapped in the face with fingers slightly spaced…Doused with near freezing water from a hose. ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg was the most detailed about the depravities exacted on prisoners with the permission of top Justice Department lawyer Jay Bybee. She quoted the American Civil Liberties Union's label for these outrages--"torture"--but could not manage to use the word herself.

ABC's Crawford Greenburg reconstructed the initial justification for the revised rules. In the "terrifying months" following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the CIA believed that their prisoner, suspected al-Qaeda leader abu-Zubaydah, was aware of pending plots. He refused to inform so the spies wanted "an increased pressure phase." Yet, Crawford Greenburg pointed out, it was not just in the post-9/11 panic that these rules were promulgated. They were reiterated in the comparative calm of 2005. NBC's Pete Williams filed a brief stand-up on the memos. "It is important to point out that these memos, written during the Bush Administration, have now been repudiated." Waterboarding, according to Obama's Justice Department, is indeed torture.

On CBS, Bob Orr adopted a radically different angle. For him, the news was not the content of the memos but the decision by this Justice Department not to prosecute the spies who acted on them, because they were "following orders that were legal at the time." He called the memos "so-called torture memos" but he did not use the T-word for waterboarding and did not list the brutalities that the memos permitted. Instead they were "rough interrogations" and "various harsh treatments." Orr told us at first that the waterboarding occurred "in the months after 9/11" but then gave the dates of the waterboarding memos as the summer of 2002 and, like ABC's Crawford Greenburg, 2005.

Was ABC anchor Charles Gibson being ironically understated or callously indifferent when he asked This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos about the domestic political reaction to these "rather tough interrogation techniques"? I could not tell. Play the video and make up your own mind. Stephanopoulos observed that the details were inflammatory enough to spur opposition to the decision not to prosecute--and to raise fears that they would be used as anti-US propaganda by "al-Qaeda's media machine."


Andrew Tyndall 4/17/09 10:19:12 pm

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