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21 Apr 2009 12:14 pm

The NYT And The Blogs

Another story the MSM missed and the blogosphere found:

The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo. The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers. 

And I'd say that small detail has made a huge amount of difference. Anyone who has studied the history of torture or followed the Cheney program closely knows how it follows classic torture techniques, however dressed up in euphemism and veiled in secrecy. But even someone utterly and happily unversed in such matters will know - as a core fact - that waterboarding someone 183 times over and over and over again is self-evidently torture. That's why Cheney has had to come out swinging. Even Fox News cannot spin that one. And the law cannot get around it.

One statistic has finally broken through the Orwellianisms, like the Abu Ghraib photographs tore off the lid of the Cheney mode of war. Hence the shift in the argument. We don't torture. We don't torture. We don't torture. Let's move on. Look: it worked.

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