When asked by NYT’s own media reporter about the NYT’s refusal to use the word torture, Bill Keller could barely exert himself to say more than the official press statement. Here’s what the spokesperson gave to Michael Calderone. A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that [...]

“Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” … The Government “thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.” SCOTUS Pentagon Papers Decision A coalition of press outlets have written DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, calling that [...]

A number of people have taken the DNC to task for its Rovian attack on RNC Chair Michael Steele for comments suggesting we might fail in Afghanistan (Glenn Greenwald, Greg Sargent, Adam Serwer). The only thing I would add to their comments is to note that not only a majority of the Democratic caucus in [...]

Enough of these namby pamby blog post tiles. The boys are back, Anna Chapman is hot and Thomas Jefferson is sleeping with teh porn.

Call me crazy, but this is probably not exactly the kind of treatment Thomas Jefferson was thinking the Declaration of Independence would receive 234 years after he wrote it. Many nights an item prompts a call to wake the NCTC director, Michael Leiter, 41, the junior member of the nighthawks. He displays a copy of [...]

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has voted to have its own commission investigate the BP disaster. The Committee finds that necessary, according to Mary Landrieu, because Obama hasn’t appointed a representative from the oil industry to his own commission. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted Wednesday to create a congressional bipartisan [...]

In this post, I described the Harvard study that showed that US’ largest newspapers stopped calling waterboarding torture once it became clear the US was doing it.I wanted to look more closely at an odd time lapse in the NYT’s Orwellian treatment of waterboarding. In a seeming defense of their refusal to call torture torture [...]

I’m going to assume John Cole was asking sincerely when he posted this request. Can someone explain this reaction from Emptywheel: After prompting Kagan to deliver the standard justification for detaining enemy combatants during war and rewarding her with a condescending compliment, Lindsey starts by getting Kagan to agree that the war on terror will [...]

Yesterday, I posted on a Harvard study showing that the press, after an established tradition of referring to waterboarding as torture, stopped doing so once it became clear the US engaged in the practice. Our press, in other words, refused to tell what they had previously presented as “the truth” (that is, that waterboarding was [...]