corrente

Yes, The World's Greatest Newspaper (not!) does manage to print the horrific picture of US personnel setting dogs on on Iraqi prisoner (back). Below the fold

But it looks like the rest of the Pulitizer-light Newspaper of Record just hasn't gotten the memo.

We've already looked at "Fluffer" Bumiller's disgraceful exhibition (back).

But in the entertainment section, hapless Sharon Waxman is still euphemizing torture as "abuse"—in a piece titled "At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil," for heaven's sake.

The caption editors (see here) are using the "abuse" euphemism too.

And the "serious" reporters aren't doing much better. Thom Sanker seems to think that the story is the pictures, not the acts. Should we release the pictures? Or not? Only at the end of the article does Sanker allow the crucial word, "systemic," to be used, and to open the possibility that there might be responsibility up the chain of command:

Senator Levin also warned that the degrading treatment of detainees might be "much more systemic than just a few guards abusing prisoners," and that it might have been part of a wider effort "to extract information from these prisoners."

"And this was part of a new intelligence policy which goes right on up to the Pentagon and perhaps even beyond," Senator Levin said.

He said that "some of the environment here was actually set at the White House when they said it was a bunch of legalisms to discuss whether or not the Geneva Conventions would apply to prisoners directly or whether they would be treated consistent with the Geneva Conventions or in the same way but not precisely."

The headline writers do just the same thing. It isn't the torture that is the problem, it's the images. (The WhiteWash House thinks the same way (back)):

"U.S. Must Find a Way to Move Past Images of Prison Abuse"
(via The Times)

The headline is over an article by David Sanger who, in the very last paragraph, gets round to the idea that it's the facts that are the important thing:

If Mr. Bush has a strategy for undoing that damage beyond the television appearances he made on two Arab networks last week, White House officials freely admit they cannot describe it.

"I'm not sure such a strategy is possible," one senior official said late last week. "The facts are simply not with us."

Of course, Facts rule. I love it that Hersh's work is being published in The New Yorker in the "Facts" department. Why can't The Newspaper of Record deal with this?

Facts, facts, facts....

From drip, drip, drip to splash, splash, splash....