(updated below)

Agence France Press, yesterday:

The Bush administration repeatedly sought to block investigations into alleged killings of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners by a US-backed Afghan warlord in 2001, The New York Times reported Friday.

Top US officials discouraged separate probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department and the Pentagon into the mass killings because it was conducted by the forces of General Abdul Rashid Dostam, a warlord then on the Central Intelligence Agency's payroll, the Times said on its website. . . .

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, have told Karzai they objected to the recent reinstatement of Dostam as military chief of staff, the Times said, citing a senior State Department official.

"We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated," the official added, hinting the Obama administration is open to an inquiry.

The New York Times, April 23, 2009:

Senate Democratic leaders, joining forces with the Obama White House, said they would resist efforts by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats to create a special commission to investigate the harsh interrogation methods that the Bush administration approved for terrorism suspects.

At a meeting of top Democrats at the White House Wednesday night, President Obama told Congressional leaders that he did not want a special inquiry, which he said would potentially steal time and energy from his ambitious policy priorities, and could mushroom into a wider distraction by looking back at other aspects of the Bush years.

The New York Times, February 9, 2009:

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries, where they say they were tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could threaten national security and relations with other nations.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama harshly criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees, and he has broken with that administration on questions like whether to keep open the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a government lawyer, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

That about sums everything up:  War Crimes are heinous and intolerable acts that all decent people reject; "anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated"; and War Criminals must not be allowed in any positions of authority . . . . except when the War Crimes in question are committed by Americans, in which case all investigations and accountability must be blocked and those who defended and even approved them are perfectly welcomed in our highest positions of authority (including, ironically, overseeing our war in Afghanistan).  See also, quite relatedly:  this post from earlier today on how we continue to shield from any accountability the clear and serious crimes committed by Bush officials in how they spied on Americans.  Let's just repeat the sermon from the anonymous Obama official in demanding an investigation into crimes by this Afghan warlord:  "We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated."  It doesn't appear that they know what the word "anyone" means.

UPDATE:  Obama today is in Ghana and, according to CBS News' Mark Knoller, he vowed that the U.S. would help Africa "hold war criminals accountable" -- meaning, of course, African war criminals.  Obviously, the magnitude of war crimes can vary, but given the huge impact (including many detainee deaths) which Bush war crimes wreaked, no reasonable person can argue that accountability is inappropriate there because they aren't significant enough.  Rather obviously, the only attribute that causes us to shield them from exposure and accountability is that they are American.

The Bush-era torture regime might have been that administration's most flamboyant act of criminality, but its illegal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (and other still-unknown surveillance programs) has always been the clearest.  We had a law in place for 30 years that made it a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense to do exactly that which Bush got caught doing:  eavesdropping on the communications of American citizens without warrants from the FISA court.  The Inspectors General report (.pdf) on Bush's NSA activities released on Friday afternoon -- one that was mandated by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 in lieu of a real investigation -- highlights how rampant and blatant was the lawlessness that pervaded the Bush administration. 

Nonetheless, because the Obama administration is actively blocking any real investigation -- Obama opposes all Congressional investigations into Bush-era crimes and, worse, is engaged in extraordinary efforts to block courts from adjudicating the legality of Bush's surveillance activities by claiming that even long-obsolete and clearly criminal programs are "state secrets" -- it is quite likely, despite how blatant is the lawbreaking, that there will be no consequences for any of it.  In a Look-to-the-Future-Not-the-Past political culture, it's irrelevant how severe is the lawbreaking by high government officials.  They know they will face no consequences even when, as here, they deliberately commit felonies -- which is precisely why criminality is so rampant in our political class.

Several others have detailed some of the key facts revealed by the IG Report.  I want to highlight some other points that emerge:

(1)  The IG Report is more notable for what it fails to address than for what it discloses, but that's the nature of IG Reports.  Most of the key players who authorized the illegal domestic spying -- David Addington, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, John Ashcroft, George Tenet -- simply refused to talk to the IGs or, in many cases, didn't even bother responding to their request.  The IG's have no power at all to compel them to do so; it's entirely optional.  That -- aside from the fact that they work within the Executive Branch and for the very agencies they are supposed to investigate -- is what makes IGs such an inadequate substitute for real oversight:  no matter how much integrity and independence they might have, they are extremely limited in what they can achieve.  

As any litigator will tell you, the lack of power to compel key witnesses to answer questions and produce documents severely hampers any ability to conduct a real investigation.  Yet, when they passed the FISA Amendments Act -- which legalized Bush's spying programs and immunized lawbreaking telecoms -- Democratic leaders kept pointing to the requirement of an IG Report to placate those complaining that they were whitewashing and legalizing Bush abuses.  But IGs are simply incapable, given their very limited powers and their institutional allegiances, of any real investigation of this sort.  What they were unable to disclose in this Report underscores how limited are their investigative abilities.

(2) Though there are a few new facts disclosed by the IG Report, most of the key facts remain concealed -- including in cases where ongoing concealment is plainly unjustified.  Ever since February, 2006 -- when Alberto Gonzales used conspicuously strained phraseology when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee -- it has been crystal clear that the NSA program famously disclosed by The New York Times in December, 2005 (which involved "only" international calls placed or received by Americans) was just one of many illegal surveillance programs Bush had ordered.  This is how I described that clear fact all the way back in February, 2006:

As the exchange with Schumer demonstrates, Gonzales was very meticulous in pointing out that Comey (and Goldsmith) had no objections to the current incarnation of the program, which means they did have objections either to: (a) some prior incarnation or otherwise proposed version of the program and/or (b) some other eavesdropping programs.

And ever since James Comey testified in May, 2007 that he was willing to give legal approval to the illegal program that the NYT disclosed, but had threatened to resign if a whole slew of other blatantly criminal surveillance activities did not cease, it has been publicly known that there are still many illegal surveillance programs which remain concealed.  In the wake of the Comey testimony in 2007, current OLC official Marty Lederman noted that even the right-wing radicals who approved of the program revealed by the NYT (Comey, Goldsmith, Ashcroft) were so disturbed by the blatant criminality of these other programs that they were going to resign en masse if they did not cease.  As Lederman put it:

If [what the NYT revealed] is the narrow version of the NSA program, just how broad and indiscriminate was the surveillance under the program that Ashcroft, et al. would not approve?  . . . . This is the real heart of the Comey story -- What happened between September 2001 and October 2003, before Comey and Goldmsith came aboard? Just how radical were the Administration's legal judgments? How extreme were the programs they implemented? How egregious was the lawbreaking?

Amazingly, that key question goes completely unanswered in the IG Report.  We still have absolutely no idea what the Government was doing regarding domestic spying ("Other Intelligence Activities") that -- even in the eyes of Far Right, Bush-appointed legal theorists who approved of the program the NYT revealed -- were so blatantly illegal that they would quit if they did not cease.  Given that these programs allegedly stopped in 2004 once the DOJ refused to certify their legality, what possible justification is there for continuing to conceal blatantly criminal acts by our high government officials?  While the IG Report fails to identify what these "Other Intelligence Activities" were, it does make crystal clear -- on pp. 28-29 -- just how blatantly illegal they were (click on images to enlarge them):

To say that "a viable legal rationale could not be found" and that there is no "legal basis to support" these Other Intelligence Activities is to say that they are criminal.  And even DOJ lawyers so extreme that they were willing to approve the illegal NSA program we know about concluded this was so.  Nonetheless, they went on for two years at least, and Bush ordered them to continue even after his own DOJ concluded they were criminal.  Revealingly, Alberto Gonzales explicitly told top DOJ lawyers that the White House didn't care about their views that what Bush was doing was illegal because that renowned legal scholar -- George W. Bush himself -- declared that they were legal:

So here we have proof of clear presidential criminality as blatant as can be imagined:  knowing his own DOJ believed these surveillance activities were criminal, Bush ordered them to continue anyway (and then only ordered them to cease once the entire top-level of his DOJ, in an election year, was on the verge of resigning in protest).  Yet we still have no idea what these illegal activities were.  The IG Report does nothing to illuminate this central question.  And President Obama continues to actively impede the only meaningful avenues for disclosure and accountability:  a Congressional investigation armed with subpoena power and/or a judicial adjudication of the legality of these acts.

(3) When the Democratic-led Congress -- with Barack Obama on board -- responded to the NSA scandal by enacting a law (the FISA Amendments Act of 2008) to legalize Bush's criminal surveillance programs and retroactively immunize the private-sector telecom lawbreakers, many of us wrote at the time that the law Obama supported actually authorized even broader eavesdropping powers than the illegal Bush program itself asserted.  The IG Report confirmed this to be the case:

That, for me, remains the single most compelling evidence of how ludicrously broken and corrupt our political class is on a very bipartisan basis.   George Bush gets caught red-handed breaking long-standing laws in how he spies on Americans.  The "opposition party" which controls the Congress not only blocks any investigations and attempts to impose accountability.  Far worse, they proceed to legalize the very criminal programs that were exposed and to vest even greater surveillance powers in the very administration that got caught deliberately breaking the law.  

(4) The IG Report makes very clear that John Yoo's legal opinions authorizing these surveillance programs were not merely wrong, but were something much worse:  radically flawed and fundamentally inaccurate.  The IG Report accuses Yoo of simply misstating the spying activities he was authorizing.  His opinions steadfastly ignored the parts of FISA which made clear how illegal the administration's conduct was (Yoo, for instance, claimed that FISA did not apply to wartime but then ignored the provision of FISA that explicitly defined the President's eavesdropping powers during war).  Yoo never once mentioned the key Supreme Court opinion -- Youngstown -- that defined presidential and Congressional powers in the modern era and made clear how invalid was Bush's claim that he had the right to break the law.

These were not legal opinions in any sense of the word.  What happened, instead, is clear:  Cheney and Addington knew that Yoo was a hardened ideologue who would authorize anything they wanted.  So they purposely chose only him -- a low-level Assistant Attorney General -- to be "read into" the program, and then used his memos to give themselves legal cover.  The same thing happened in the realm of torture.  This is what reveals how corrupt is the claim that Bush officials cannot be held accountable for the laws they broke because they had DOJ lawyers telling them it was legal.  These legal opinions were anything but exercises in good faith.  They were nothing more than bureaucratic cover to commit crimes, and -- as the IG Report makes clear -- ones that were as factually inaccurate as they were legally flawed (yet John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law).

To accept the central premise of our political class -- it's unfair to prosecute Bush officials for things that DOJ lawyers told them was legal -- is to destroy the rule of law in the United States.  Presidents will always be able to find subservient John Yoos in the bowels of the DOJ willing to authorize anything they want to do.  There is no such thing as a permission slip from an underling to commit felonies.  Yet our political class -- obviously motivated by their own self-interest -- has decided in unison to endorse the principle that the existence of such documents should bar accountability even for clear crimes.

(5) That these surveillance programs were criminal -- no matter the ends to which they were used -- has always been crystal clear. But what has always been uninvestigated is whether these surveillance powers were systematically abused for purely political ends.  The IG Report does not answer that because -- lacking subpoena power -- it cannot.  All it does is survey various national security officials -- the ones who agreed voluntarily to answer questions -- to find out if they thought the programs were helpful.  Even that very limited and unreliable inquiry revealed that most eavesdropping leads had little or nothing to do with Terrorism.

Over the past couple of years, there have been isolated leaks suggesting abuses of these eavesdropping powers, but there has been no real investigation into the ends to which these surveillance powers were used.  As a legal question, it matters little:  eavesdropping without warrants is a felony no matter the purpose for which it was done.  But since FISA's warrant requirement arose from the recognition that widespread surveillance abuses were virtually inevitable if eavesdropping was conducted without judicial oversight, the lack of any investigation into this question reveals the extent to which both parties have been eager to help cover-up the crimes that were committed during the Bush years.  The IG Report sheds some light onto what happened, but most of it, as intended, remains in the dark, and real accountability is still as far away as it was before this Report was issued.

(updated below - Update II)

McClatchy's Nancy Youssef has an article today that is a consummate example of excellent journalism.  I don't want to excerpt any of it or even summarize what it reports because I really want to encourage everyone to click the link and read it in its entirety (it's not very long:  roughly 1,300 words).  Please read Youssef's article before reading the following points I think are worth making about it:

(1) Note that Wakil was detained at Guantanamo for six years -- until April, 2008.  That entire time, and especially into 2007 and 2008, government officials were assuring the public that all remaining Guantanamo prisoners were "the worst of the worst."  That claim continues to be made.  No matter how many times the statements of government officials are proven false, the assumption remains that the pronouncements from high government officials are true.

(2) Even now, defenders of Obama's preventive detention policy (i.e., indefinitely imprisoning people with no charges) insist that this is necessary because those in Guantanamo are "too dangerous to release" and we cannot convict them in a real court.  What's their basis for believing that people who have been convicted of absolutely nothing are nonetheless "too dangerous to release"?  The Government -- our trusted leaders -- claim it's true, so it must be.  No matter how many stories there are like the one today from McClatchy's -- where emphatic accusations about a detainee turn out to be totally false -- the willingness to believe unproven assertions from government officials about Muslims detainees is never-ending.

(3)  The central assumption in our discussions of Guantanamo and detention policy generally has been, and continues to be, that those in Guantanamo are, by definition, Terrorists.  No matter how many times that is proven to be false, the assumption endures.

(4) Note the central role The New York Times played -- yet again -- in spreading and given credence to pure government propaganda.  And the method used to accomplish that is exactly what led them to help disseminate lies about the "Iraq threat" in the run-up to the war:  anonymous government sources leak something, they mindlessly print it without identifying who gave it to them, Dick Cheney cites the NYT article to bolster the lie, and then -- even once the NYT is forced to admit they were used -- they not only protect the identity of the anonymous sources who manipulated them, but they'll use the same exact method tomorrow -- and the day after and the day after that -- to report the "news."  

What Judy Miller and Michael Gordon did in September, 2002 on the front page -- that the NYT supposedly regrets so much -- is exactly what Elisabeth Bumiller and her editors did here on the front page.  As a result, a blatant lie -- that 1 in 7 released Guantanamo detainees "returned to jihad" -- became, as intended, embedded fact in our political debates.

(5) It cannot be overstated how flimsy is the basis for so many accusations of "enemy combatant" status from the U.S. Government.  Wakil is someone who -- as the Bush administration knew and admitted since as early as 2004 when it conducted a status review hearing --  actively opposed the Taliban and al Qaeda:

Despite all of that, the Pentagon continued to keep him in a cage for four more years based on extremely vague associations that led them to insist that he was an "enemy combatant."  So we invade and occupy his country and then decide that -- although he worked against our Enemies -- some alleged "associations" he had reflect an agenda that conflicts with ours and a "source's" unverified accusations that he helped our Enemy entitle us to lock him away.  So we abduct him from his country and ship him thousands of miles away to an island, stick him in a cage for six years with no trial, call him an "enemy combatant," and then once he's released, he does nothing to engage in any violence or attacks on the U.S. of any kind (even though we're still bombing and occupying his country).

There are so many cases like that:  where alleged "enemy combatants" -- The Worst of the Worst -- were released, and the notion that they are dangerous proven to be utterly false.  Despite that, morally depraved people still blithely demand that anyone we deem to be a "combatant" be kept in a cage "forever" with no trial or charges of any kind, even if they are acquitted of the charges against them.

(6) As the McClatchy article reflects, what is and is not real "journalism" is not that complicated.  The government makes a claim.  The role of the "journalist" is not to repeat it or merely report that the government claims it, but instead, to investigate it with skepticism to determine whether it is true, and then report if it isn't.  And journalists don't have to wait for a member of the "opposition party" to call them and object before doing so.  That's so basic that it's staggering to believe that it is disputed, and yet not only is that proposition disputed, it is explicitly rejected by many -- if not most -- establishment journalists.  And in that fact lies much of the explanation for what has happened in the U.S. during this decade (at least).

UPDATE:  In noting the cruel irony that Wakil's plight of being declared guilty with no trial is now repeating itself -- as he's accused by the DOD's leaked report of having "returned to terrorism" -- the McClatchy article contains these truly ugly passages:

Despite his bravado, Wakil acknowledges that the report has him worried that he'll be detained again.

Never out of his reach are a stack of legal documents, letters signed by scores of high-ranking officials and frayed newspaper clippings that he believes prove that he isn't — and never has been — a terrorist.  Documents in hand, he's always prepared to make the case he was never given the opportunity to make at Guantanamo.

"For six years, I was ready to go to court and defend myself. They should show the world their proof against me," Wakil said. "I am ready to answer any question". . . .

He raised his voice only once, as he described his anger that once again he's facing accusations and no trial.

"Where is the justice? I am still being threatened because of this," Wakil said, his arms flailing.

So here we have an Afghan citizen, not captured on any battlefield, who naively thought that he would be given a "trial" before being locked in a cage indefinitely by the U.S.  He obviously hadn't heard that the U.S. is a country-- because of people like this -- that knows "trials" are obsolete and insists that we can abduct anyone we want from around the world and lock them away forever without such bothersome procedures.  Wakil surely knows that by now, which is why he fears -- quite reasonably -- that he'll be locked away again with no trial based on the Pentagon's anonymous accusations against him (and based on the current President's demand for the power to keep people imprisoned "preventively" -- i.e., with no charges or trials).  

As for the "justice" Wakil seeks:  sorry, but "justice" requires that we look to the past to find out what happened and impose accountability for it.  We don't do that.  We're the United States.  We have too many important matters to attend to.  We only Look to the Future and rise above and beyond such "policy disputes" about the past.

UPDATE II:  The DOJ today announces yet another conviction of an accused Al Qaeda Terrorist in a real court (h/t Adam Serwer):

WASHINGTON—A 35-year-old Minneapolis man was sentenced today in federal court on one count of conspiring to provide material support and resources to al Qaeda.

David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and Frank J. Magill, U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota announced that on July 9 in Minneapolis, U.S. District Court Judge John Tunheim sentenced Mohammed Abdullah Warsame to 92 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

Warsame, a naturalized Canadian citizen of Somali descent, was charged with one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—al Qaeda—in a Jan. 20, 2004, indictment returned in the District of Minnesota.

What's so striking isn't merely the willingness of so many people to believe unproven government assertions that a detainee is a "DANGEROUS TERRORIST."  Similarly uncritical is the willingness to believe -- without evidence -- that accused Terrorists  cannot be convicted in a real court and "military commissions" and "preventive detention" powers are therefore necessary.  The statutes criminalizing "material support for terrorism" are breakthakingly broad.  Any Muslim who even sneezes in the direction of a group declared by the U.S. Govenment to be a Terrorist organization can easily be convicted under those statutes.  Those laws have been used to convict people as Terrorists for doing nothing more than broadcasting a Hezbollah TV station in the U.S.

From the case today, not even the DOJ claimed that the convicted Terrorist ever engaged in any violent acts or participated in any actual Terrorist plots.  Instead, he's being sent to prison for 8 years for having attended Al Qaeda camps, having communicated with Al Qaeda, and expressing admiration for and loyalty to Osama bin Laden.  By design, there are few crimes easier to prosecute than "material support" crimes.  Like all government claims, the assertion that "preventive detention," military commissions and other forms of trial-free imprisonments are necessary because the Government cannot obtain convictions against Dangerous Terrorists should be treated with extreme skepticism -- that's especially true given the dangerous powers in service of which that claim is being advanced.

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)

Spencer Ackerman yesterday attended a Senate hearing at which the DOD's General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, testified.  As Ackerman highlighted, Johnson actually said that even for those detainees to whom the Obama administration deigns to give a real trial in a real court, the President has the power to continue to imprison them indefinitely even if they are acquitted at their trial.  About this assertion of "presidential post-acquittal detention power" -- an Orwellian term (and a Kafka-esque concept) that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares at all about the most basic liberties -- Ackerman wrote, with some understatement, that it "moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective."  Law professor Jonathan Turley was more blunt:  "The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies — now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention." 

In June, Robert Gibbs was repeatedly asked by ABC News' Jake Tapper whether accused Terrorists who were given a trial and were acquitted would be released as a result of the acquittal, but Gibbs -- amazingly -- refused to make that commitment.  But this is the first time an Obama official has affirmatively stated that they have the "post-acquittal detention" power (and, to my knowledge, the Bush administration never claimed the power to detain someone even if they were acquitted).

All of this underscores what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal:   to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison.  They'll create various procedures to prettify the process, but the outcome is always the same -- ongoing detention for as long as the President dictates.   This is how I described it when Obama first unveiled his proposal of preventive detention:

If you really think about the argument Obama made yesterday -- when he described the five categories of detainees and the procedures to which each will be subjected -- it becomes manifest just how profound a violation of Western conceptions of justice this is. What Obama is saying is this: we'll give real trials only to those detainees we know in advance we will convict. For those we don't think we can convict in a real court, we'll get convictions in the military commissions I'm creating. For those we can't convict even in my military commissions, we'll just imprison them anyway with no charges ("preventively detain" them).

After yesterday, we have to add an even more extreme prong to this policy:  if by chance we miscalculate and deign to give a trial to a detainee who is then acquitted, we'll still just keep them in prison anyway by presidential decree.  That added step renders my criticism of Obama's conception of "justice" even more applicable:

Giving trials to people only when you know for sure, in advance, that you'll get convictions is not due process. Those are called "show trials." In a healthy system of justice, the Government gives everyone it wants to imprison a trial and then imprisons only those whom it can convict. The process is constant (trials), and the outcome varies (convictions or acquittals).

Obama is saying the opposite: in his scheme, it is the outcome that is constant (everyone ends up imprisoned), while the process varies and is determined by the Government (trials for some; military commissions for others; indefinite detention for the rest). The Government picks and chooses which process you get in order to ensure that it always wins. A more warped "system of justice" is hard to imagine.

In today's Wall St. Journal, which also reported that "the Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges," Rep. Jerry Nadler was quoted as saying something quite similar about the Obama approach:

"What bothers me is that they seem to be saying, 'Some people we have good enough evidence against, so we'll give them a fair trial. Some people the evidence is not so good, so we'll give them a less fair trial. We'll give them just enough due process to ensure a conviction because we know they're guilty. That's not a fair trial, that's a show trial," Mr. Nadler said.

Exactly.  Show trials are exactly what the Obama administration is planning.  In its own twisted way, the Bush approach was actually more honest and transparent:  they made no secret of their belief that the President could imprison anyone he wanted without any process at all.  That's clearly the Obama view as well, but he's creating an elaborate, multi-layered, and purely discretionary "justice system" that accomplishes exactly the same thing while creating the false appearance that there is due process being accorded.   And for those who -- to justify what Obama is doing -- make the not unreasonable point that Bush left Obama with a difficult quandary at Guantanamo, how will that excuse apply when these new detention powers are applied not only to existing Guantanamo detainees but to future (i.e., not-yet-abducted) detainees as well?

Whatever else is true, even talking about imprisoning people based on accusations of which they have been exonerated is a truly grotesque perversion of everything that our justice system and Constitution are supposed to guarantee.  That's one of those propositions that ought to be too self-evident to need stating.

* * * * *

Several related points:  Spencer also notes that Johnson testified yesterday about the possibility that Guantanamo might remain open beyond January, 2010 -- the date Obama, to much fanfare, established as the deadline for closing that prison.  That decision is one of the very few to which Obama defenders can cling in order to claim there are significant differences between his approach to these issues and the Bush/Cheney approach. 

Meanwhile, former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed is engaged in what The Guardian calls "an urgent legal attempt to prevent the US courts from destroying crucial evidence that he says proves he was abused while being held at the detention camp detainee."  The photographs -- which show Mohamed after he had been severely beaten and which he claims was posted on the door to his cage "because he had been beaten so badly that it was difficult for the guards to identify him" -- is scheduled to be destroyed by the U.S. Government, an act The Washington Independent's Alexandra Jaffe calls "another black mark on the Obama administration’s promised transparency."

Finally, I was on an NPR station yesterday in Seattle to discuss NPR's ban on the use of the word "torture" to describe Bush administration interrogation tactics.  I originally understood that I would be on with NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard, but alas, it turns out that she agreed only to be on the show before me, so as not to engage or otherwise interact with me, so I was forced to listen to her for 15 minutes and wait until she hung up before being able to speak.  The segment can be heard here, beginning at the 14:00 mark (though the quality of the recording is poor in places).   

The most noteworthy point was her explicit statement (at 17:50) that "the role of a news organization is to lay out the debate"; rarely is the stenographic model of "journalism" -- "we just repeat what each side says and leave it at that" -- so expressly advocated (and see Jon Stewart's perfect mockery of that view).  She also said -- when the host asked about the recent example I cited of NPR's calling what was done to a reporter in Gambia "torture" (at the 20:20 mark) -- that NPR will use the word "torture" to describe what other governments do because they do it merely to sadistically inflict pain on people while the U.S. did it for a noble reason:  to obtain information about Terrorist attacks.  That's really what she said:  that when the U.S. did it (as opposed to Evil countries), it was for a good reason.  Leaving aside the factual falsity of her claim about American motives, Shepard actually thinks that "torture" is determined by the motive with which the suffering is inflicted.  The connection between the Government's ability to get away with these things and the media's warped view of its role really cannot be overstated.

UPDATE: The ACLU's Ben Wizner emails to correct one point I made:   the Bush administration, like Obama is doing now, did claim the power of post-acquittal detentions.  Ben writes:

Glenn – You’re right that this is disgraceful, but not that it’s new. The Bush gang claimed the same authority in connection with Gitmo military commissions, which is why, paradoxically, the only way to get out of Gitmo if you were charged in a military commission was to plead guilty and strike a deal that included repatriation (as David Hicks did).

This is from an LA Times op-ed I wrote in 4/07:

Last Friday night, after a jury of senior military officers sentenced Hicks to seven years in prison, we all learned the details of that agreement: Hicks will serve a mere nine months -- a sentence more in keeping with a misdemeanor than with a grave terrorist offense.

This stunning turn of events highlights a cruelly ironic feature of detention at Guantanamo. In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released.  In Guantanamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released -- because even if he is acquitted, he remains an "enemy combatant" subject to indefinite detention. Only by striking a deal does a detainee stand a chance of getting out.

So this is (another) one of those cases where Obama is embracing a radical Bush theory of power rather than inventing one of his own.

UPDATE II: The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain aide, is someone who believes that the President possesses what he calls "near dictatorial power" when it comes to national security.  He has repeatedly praised Obama for maintaining Bush Terrorism policies.  But even Goldfarb is uncomfortable with Obama's assertion of "post-acquittal detention power":

I understand and respect the president's decision to disregard his left-wing critics and embrace the same policies of indefinite detention and denial of due process that made the Bush-Cheney administration so effective in preventing another terror attack. I support those policies because as illegal enemy combatants, terrorists have no right to due process. But, as Glenn Greenwald points out, there is something Orwellian about this administration's attempt to have it both ways -- to get the credit for putting detainees on trial only to disregard the outcome if they don't like the verdict. Obviously the Bush administration would have done the same if they thought for a second that they could get away with it. But even the Bush OLC wouldn't have dared suggest detaining individuals who had been acquitted on all charges.

As Ben Wizner's email in the prior update reflects, it's far from clear that "even the Bush OLC wouldn't have dared suggest detaining individuals who had been acquitted on all charges."  Still, if your assertions of executive power and denial of due process to Muslim detainees even make Michael "near dictatorial power" Goldfarb uncomfortable, that's a pretty compelling sign that you're way, way out there.

UPDATE III: When Kevin Drum read the above summary I wrote of how Alicia Shepard justified NPR's using "torture" to describe the acts of Gambia but not the U.S., he said he assumed I was exaggerating, because nobody could actually believe the explanation I attributed to Shepard -- that they do it for bad reasons and it's therefore "torture," while we do it for noble reasons and therefore it's not.  But then he listened to the show and transcribed Shepard's statement.  Kevin then wrote:

Wow. She really did say that, didn't she? When other people do it for other reasons, it's torture. When we do it for our reasons, it's not.

You don't usually find people willing to say this quite so baldly. Congratulations, Alicia Shepard.

Along those same lines, Jesse Levine, a long-time reader who is a government lawyer, emailed this to me today:

I just had the most bizarre conversation with Alicia Shepard. I called and told her I had been following the contretemps over NPR's use of the word torture and wanted to confirm that she had said what you had reported about her view of sadism vs. intelligence gathering as defining torture. She said she did and that it was a political question because it is torture on one hand and "tactics" on the other. I said I understood there was a political debate about whether torture was justified in certain circumstances, but again asked if an act itself was torture; specifically asking, "if you cut off someone's hand is it not torture whether motivated by sadism or intelligence gathering?" She said it was and then quickly shifted back to the torture vs. tactics meme. I gave up.

I've been going back and forth on whether Shepard's deficiency is primarily one of intellect or whether she's just a hard-core Cheneyite.  I'm now convinced -- after her statements yesterday on that show I did with after her -- that it's both.  

Anyone who can say that what we do is not "torture" because we do it for the right reasons -- whereas it's "torture" when those other countries do it because they're sadistic and bad -- is someone who is devoid of both basic reasoning skills and good motives.  This Saturday, at 2:30 p.m., in Washington, DC, Shepard will be appearing at this event to talk about "the role of the Ombudsman."  It's open to the public.  I don't know if there will be opportunity for questions, though one can always create that opportunity if one is so inclined.

UPDATE IV:  From Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 12:

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

"No, no!” said the Queen. "Sentence first -- verdict afterward."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!"

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.

"I won’t!" said Alice.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

The Queen's pronouncement -- "Sentence first -- verdict afterward" -- is a fine expression of Obama's approach here:  these prisoners are decreed to be Dangerous and Guilty and are sentenced to prolonged, indefinite, imprisonment and must not be released; now let's tailor a process for each of them to ensure that this verdict is produced.

UPDATE V:  Just compare Alicia Shepard's justification for why NPR calls Gambia's tactics "torture" but not America's -- they do it to inflict pain whereas we (supposedly) did it to extract information -- to the definition of "torture" in the Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. has been a siganatory since 1988:

Part I, Article I:  For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

The entire civilized world has long defined "torture" to include tactics used to obtain information.  By virtue of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, that definition is binding law ("supreme law") in the U.S.  But to NPR's Ombdusman, it's not "torture" if they are simply -- as she put it -- "tactics used to get information."  Those are the depths to which NPR is willing to sink in order to twist language and protect the Bush administration and the U.S. Government.

(updated below)

In yet another sign of how online media outlets are strengthening as their older establishment predecessors are struggling to survive, The Huffington Post has hired Dan Froomkin to be its Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger.  Froomkin will oversee a staff of four five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page.  I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning.

Under still-unclear circumstances, which executives refuse to discuss even with their own Ombudsman, Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper's most popular.  Almost immediately upon the reporting of Froomkin's firing, screenwriter Nora Ephron, an Editor-at-Large for The Huffington Post, emailed Huffington with a one-line note:  "I hope we're hiring him."  Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week.  That was just one of numerous overtures Froomkin received from various media outlets interested in hiring him (Salon was one such outlet expressing preliminary interest, but both Froomkin and Salon believed that much of what I do here already overlaps with much of the work he does).

Though the precise reasons for Froomkin's firing by The Post remain unclear, there's no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions.  In recent months, The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques.  In the wake of his firing, Post defenders misleadingly focused on (and then rebutted) the obvious strawman argument that Froomkin was fired for being "liberal."  But that, in fact, was something virtually nobody claimed.  Instead, it was Froomkin's practice of exposing the corrupt practices of establishment journalists (both by his words and deeds) that made him such a unique presence at The Post.  Pioneering press critic Bob Somerby put it this way:

Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. . . . If there’s one thing you’ll never see [E.J.] Dionne or [Eugene] Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. . .  But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press.  That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.

Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what "both sides" say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media -- Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett -- are routinely heard in the very venues they attack).  As Brad DeLong documented in a thorough retrospective on Froomkin's firing, the first attempt at The Post to remove Froomkin from his status as "reporter" was driven by right-wing complaints that the content of his column was inappropriate for a reporter.

Huffington says that it is Froomkin's views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal.  The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides."  Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion."  The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price."  Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view:  "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media."  

While this pairing is, in some ways, a natural one (even the Post Ombudsman suggested that "Web sites like The Huffington Post or Politico would seem a perfect fit"), there are also potential sources of tension.  As a practitioner of what he calls "accountability journalism" -- "explaining how Washington works; pulling no punches" -- Froomkin has been a vehement critic of the Obama administration for the last several months, while The Huffington Post frequently trumpeted (some might say "cheerleading") the Obama campaign and even his presidency (though it has become mildly more critical of Obama in recent months; its screaming, red headline today: "White House May Cave on Public Option").  Will Froomkin's harsh criticisms of Obama alienate an Obama-loving HuffPost readership?  

And given the central importance of Arianna Huffington's personal relationships with key media figures and those in power, will Froomkin's unrestrained criticisms of many of those same people undermine a key aspect of The Huffington Post's business and promotional strategies?  Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice. 

For all the self-serving talk about how political journalism is dying, it is striking how new and online media outlets continue to thrive.  Yesterday, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo -- which began as a one-person blog --  announced a major investment from Netscape founder Marc Andreesen that is allowing it to double its reporting staff.  And now today, a columnist fired by an old, struggling establishment outlet claiming "business reasons" as a motive is not only almost immediately hired by a new media entity, but was inundated with expressions of interest and even other offers from an electic mix of reporting outlets.

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying.  What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres.  As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience."  People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices.  The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists.  In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

UPDATE:  Media Matters' Jamison Foser uses pictures to convey "what The Washington Post is up to these days."  With leadership like Fred Hiatt and the nepotism-benefiting Graham family, it's really no wonder that -- with a couple of individual exceptions -- it's become such a sad spectacle.  Nora Ephron said this morning:  "I used to read Dan Froomkin religiously -- I thought he was one of the best things at the Washington Post. I was bewildered when he was fired."  At least it freed up money to produce embarrassing vaudeville videos from Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza.  When they're not selling access to lobbyists and printing John Bolton Op-Eds urging some new war on the latest Enemy, that is what "the Post is up to these days."

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

According to The New York Times this morning, violent clashes between Chinese government forces and Muslim Uighurs -- that country's long-oppressed minority -- have left at least 140 people dead and close to 1,000 injured.  This incident in Western China highlights an important fact about America's "War on Terror."

Just imagine if the Uighurs were a Christian -- rather than Muslim -- minority, battling against the tyrannical Communist regime in Beijing, resisting various types of persecution, and demanding religious freedom.  They would be lionized by America's Right, as similar Christian minorities, oppressed by tyrannical regimes, automatically are.  Episodes like these -- where a declared Tyranny like China violently acts against citizens with whom we empathize -- are ones about which, in general, the American political class loves to sermonize.

But the Uighurs are Muslim, not Christian, and hostility towards them thus easily outweighs the opportunity they present to undermine the Chinese Government.  Rather than support and venerate them, we instead spent this decade declaring them to be "enemy combatants" and locking them up in Guantanamo -- despite the fact that they have never evinced any interest in doing anything other than resisting Chinese persecution, and have certainly never taken actions against the U.S. (as even the Bush administration ultimately admitted).  Yet even now, both Congress and the administration actively block release into the U.S. even of those Uighurs we wrongfully imprisoned for years, while the Right screams with outrage -- and fear -- over the administration's commendable efforts to find a home for them elsewhere.

For all the Serious analysis about the War on Terror, so much of it has been driven by nothing more complex or noble than sheer hostility towards Muslims.  Muslims generally -- not just Al Qaeda -- replaced Communists as our New Enemy and became the new enabling force for our endless state of War and never-ending expansions of executive power.  Rather obviously, the Uighurs were swept into the Enemy category solely by virtue of their status as Muslims.  What more compelling evidence of that could be imagined than the fact that we imprisoned -- and continue to imprison -- people at Guantanamo whose only political interest is in resisting oppression by the Chinese government?

UPDATE:  On a related note:  there is much worthwhile commentary about Joe Biden's statements yesterday that Israel is "entitled" as a sovereign nation to attack Iran and the U.S. would do nothing to stand in its way.  Marc Lynch examines what Biden likely meant and did not mean, but more importantly documents that it was perceived in the Middle East -- including in Iran and Israel -- as the U.S. giving the "green light" to Israel.  Digby explains the particular stupidity of the U.S. appearing to threaten Iran with an Israeli attack -- of all things -- in light of the current political turmoil inside that country.  And Chris Floyd describes how the "principles" invoked by Biden apply only to the U.S. and those within "the golden circle of imperial favor," while those disfavored by the U.S. are explicitly denied such rights.

There are so many hypocrisies embedded in what Biden said that it is impossible to note all of them.  Last August, Biden himself demanded that Russia -- at least as "sovereign" a country as Israel -- withdraw from Georgia and threatened recriminations if they did not.  The U.S. is now demanding that sovereign Israel cease West Bank settlements.  The entire effort against Iran is based on an attempt to dictate that sovereign country's nuclear policies.  The whole world knows that telling other countries what to do is what the U.S. does generally, and that the massive amounts of various aid we give to Israel allows us to dictate its actions particularly. Given all the ways we enable Israeli actions -- financial, military, diplomatic -- there are very few people who would interpret an Israeli attack on Iran as being done without American approval.

All that said, I think Biden's comments yesterday were more the by-product of the unique ineptitude and plain dumbness that Biden often exhibits rather than a conscious attempt by the Obama administration to announce some new policy.  I say that mostly because Biden himself repeated the same comments back in October, 2008, when he told so-called "members of the Jewish media" that whether Israel attacks Iran "is not a question for us to tell the Israelis what they can and cannot do."  That's just how Biden speaks when asked about Israel, and that was true before yesterday.  Still, whether intended or not, our general willingness to constantly threaten military action against Iran, and to refuse to publicly oppose Israel's threats, is rather obviously inconsistent with our attempts to depict Them -- those irrational, barbaric Muslims -- as the root of all hostility and aggression.

UPDATE II:  On an entirely unrelated note:  Dan Abrams, formerly of MSNBC, launched a new wesbite today devoted to reporting on the media world (Howie Kurtz profiles it here today).  The site (Mediaite), among other things, maintains rankings of media influence using puportedly objective metrics.  Their ranking of the top print and online columnists is here, and it ranks my "column" at # 9 (tragically just behind Charles Krauthammer's but ahead of Karl Rove's, Peggy Noonan's, David Brooks' and Kurtz's).  Attempting to quantify influence this way is a dubious proposition, but since the influence (or lack thereof) of blogs is a commonly debated topic among many here (including at Salon today), it seems worth noting.

UPDATE III:  So predictable:  ordinarily, on the Right, there would be nothing more Satanic than a tyrannical Communist regime suppressing the religious freedom of its citizens -- except when the minority in question is Muslim, in which case they side with and adopt the propaganda of the Communist regime and disgustingly depict the regime as the victim.  The Muslims resisting persecution are -- needless to say -- "terrorists."

(updated below)

Today is the ideal day to celebrate America's specialness, and America's paper of record inspirationally leads the ritual:

Clark Hoyt, New York Times Public Editor, April 26, 2009:

A LINGUISTIC shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Until this month, what the Bush administration called "enhanced" interrogation techniques were "harsh" techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are "brutal". . . . .

The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were "widely denounced as illegal torture." Jehl changed that to the "harshest interrogation methods" since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed. . . .

And why not, then, go all the way to torture?  Jehl said that when the paper is discussing what is generally regarded as the most extreme interrogation method the C.I.A. used, waterboarding, "we’ve become more explicit in saying in a first reference that it’s a near-drowning technique" that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and many other experts "have called torture." But he said: "I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?" Jehl argued for precision and caution. I agree.

The New York Times today:

Top Reformers Admitted Plot, Iran Declares

CAIRO -- 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. . . .

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."

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.

It's not particularly unusual for a government to permit itself to do something that it prohibits others from doing.  The U.S. is hardly the only country that does that.  But when that country's media collectively abets that government effort by molding its language to reflect that exceptionalism, it elevates the propaganda to a much different level.  When I documented the American media's obsession with journalists detained by other countries and its virtually complete blackout of much, much longer (and often more oppressive) detentions of foreign journalists by the U.S., that was the central point I tried to emphasize:

Pointing to other governments and highlighting their oppressive behavior can be cathartic, fun and gratifying in a self-justifying sort of way. Ask Fred Hiatt; it's virtually all he ever does.  But the first duty of the American media -- like the first duty of American citizens -- is to oppose oppressive behavior by our own government.  That's not as fun or as easy, but it is far more important.  Moreover, obsessively complaining about the rights-abridging behavior of other countries while ignoring the same behavior from our own government is worse than a mere failure of duty.  It is propagandistic and deceitful, as it paints a misleading picture that it is other governments -- but not our own -- which engage in such conduct.

Since the American Government has acted -- and continues to act -- overtly to protect and shield those who engaged in this conduct, will it condemn Iran for torturing detainees? As for The New York Times, at this point, they don't even seem interested in pretending that they make these editorial judgments independently or with a pretense of objectivity.  They're perfectly happy to have you know that when the U.S. Government does X, it is called one thing, but when foreign governments do X, it is called something else entirely.

UPDATE:  From NPR yesterday (h/t reader EI):

Meditations On Freedom: Refugee Finds Peace In U.S.

Musa Saidykhan had been a reporter in his home country of Gambia for more than a decade when he was arrested and later tortured by government officials. Following Saidykhan's imprisonment, he fled the country with his family and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Saidykhan explains how he will commemorate freedom on this, his first, Independence Day in the U.S.

All the impediments that prevent American media organizations from using the word "torture" certainly do evaporate quickly when it comes to other countries.