I’m beyond expecting any kind of self-awareness from major news organizations like the New York Times, but that does not mean I cannot still marvel that reporters can write, and newpaper editors can publish, descriptions like this, in an article about confessions obtained by the Iranian government in connection with the recent post-election street demonstrations (emphasis is mine):
Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a “velvet” revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say.
[…]
The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been detained.
[…]
In 2007, Iran produced a pseudo-documentary called “In the Name of Democracy,” which served as a vehicle to highlight what it called confessions of three academic researchers charged with trying to overthrow the state. “They don’t like new ideas to get to Iran,” said a researcher once investigated about his work, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They don’t like social and cultural figures in Iranian society to become very popular.”In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in.
“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”
The problem, he said, was that he was not sure what he was supposed to confess to. So over the next several months, he said, he and his interrogators “negotiated” what he would say — and, more ominously, whom he would implicate. Once his confession was complete, he said, he practiced it for 7 to 10 days, and then it ran on state-run television.
Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall. He said the interrogator asked him about prominent politicians he had interviewed, asked if they ever had affairs, and asked if he had ever slept with their wives.
“I was crying, I begged him, please do not ask me this,” said Mr. Memarian, who is in exile now in the United States. “They said if you don’t talk now you will talk in a month, in two months, in a year. If you don’t talk now, you will talk. You will just stay here.”
The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.
Not a trace of irony anywhere in this litany. No “balancing” interviews with Iranian government officials and leaders to get their “side of the story.” No suggestion or hint anywhere that the former detainees subjected to these enhanced interrogation techniques — indeed, no use of that euphemistic term — might not be telling the truth, might have been “trained to lie and exaggerate.” Not that I believe they were — not for one instant. But they would not have been granted that credibility if they had been detainees in U.S. custody.
Keep in mind that every single technique described in this article has been done by CIA interrogators (or American contractors working for the CIA) to prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret CIA detention centers around the globe. Keep in mind, additionally, that sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation and solitary confinement for long periods of time, and sensory manipulation — which are presented as serious human rights violations when done in Iran by the Iranian government to Iranian detainees — are treated with great skepticism and even mockery by the media and by conservative bloggers and pundits when done to inmates at Gitmo and other U.S. facilities.
But for U.S. news organizations like the New York Times, NPR, and so many others, interrogation techniques such as being forced to stay awake for weeks or months, and being confined in a tiny cell with no human contact and a light burning at all times, also for weeks or months, are only torture when done by other countries — and preferably countries we don’t like. When those same techniques are sanctioned and usued by our own government, they are “enhanced interrogation techniques” or “harsh interrogation techniques,” or they are “thought by some people to be tantamount to torture.” When the recipients of such treatment are in Iran, the New York Times calls them “reformers”; when they are in Guantanamo or Iraq or Afghanistan, they are “terrorists” or “suspected terrorists.”
Glenn Greenwald has more:
Virtually every tactic which the article describes the Iranians as using has been used by the U.S. during the War on Terror, while several tactics authorized by Bush officials (waterboarding, placing detainees in coffin-like boxes, hypothermia) aren’t among those the article claims are used by the Iranians. Nonetheless, “torture” appears to be a perfectly fine term for The New York Times to use to describe what the Iranians do, but one that is explicitly banned to describe what the U.S. did. Despite its claimed policy, the NYT has also recently demonstrated its eagerness to use the word “torture” to describe these same tactics . . . when used by the Chinese against an American detainee.
Notably, the NYT article today seems to take particular offense that the Iranian Government is putting people on trial using confessions they obtained via torture (“the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy — after confessions were extracted”). Just two days ago, The Washington Post reported:
The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday accused the Obama administration of using statements elicited through torture to justify the confinement of a detainee it represents at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The ACLU is asking a federal judge to throw out those statements and others made by Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who may have been as young as 12 when he was captured. His attorney argued that Jawad was abused in U.S. custody, threatened and subjected to intense sleep deprivation.
“The government’s continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past,” said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention.”The government’s continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past,” said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention.
Just read the details of what we did to this adolescent to marvel at what the NYT (and, of course, NPR) refuse to call “torture” when done by us. Though the human rights abuses of the Iranian Government are well-documented and severe, there’s also no mention in the NYT article of these interrogation tactics being applied by Iran to teenagers (such as Jawad) or resulting in numerous detainee deaths (as happened during the Bush era).
During the presidential campaign, Rudy Giuliani was widely ridiculed for arguing that whether these tactics are “torture” depends, at least in part, on who uses them (it’s torture if They do it, but not when We do it). But he could take that definitive moral relativism to any leading American newspaper, become an Editor, and fit right in, since that’s exactly the editorial policy of our leading media outlets. What’s most striking about all this media behavior is that people around the world — outside of the U.S. — aren’t fooled by these sorts of blatant double standards, whereby the U.S. even claims the power to change the meaning of words based on whether it or another country is doing something. The target of this government and media behavior is purely domestic.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.