NY Times Calls U.S. Torture Strategy "Bold and Novel"

Judith Miller may have moved on, but her collaborationist spirit is alive and well at the New York Times. In an article on the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision that reads like an obituary for the lost days of unlimited presidential power, Adam Liptak faithfully serves up the administration's talking points as transmitted through Berkeley professor John Yoo. John Yoo, you will remember, was the Justice Department lawyer who crafted this administration's torture policy, the memos which argued that there are no legal barriers to the president's ability to authorize the use of torture, memos that Liptak, in a mind-boggling display of Orwellian doublespeak, characterizes as "bold and novel."

Excuse me? The Times has apparently forgotten that the Bybee/Yoo torture memos were one of the most controversial revelations of presidential legal and military strategy since the Pentagon Papers, memos that fueled a global backlash in public opinion that has only increased in the light of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and possible war crimes committed by Marines. As a debate, this administration's willingness to commit torture goes immediately to America's ability to commit to its core values, raises uncomfortable parallels between Iraq under Saddam and Iraq under America, and has served as the most serious wedge to date between America and its traditional allies. Following their public release, the White House and the Justice Department were both forced to disavow and distance themselves from the memos. And the best the New York Times can do when describing the legal strategy that unleashed this terrible beast is to call it "bold and novel."

Quoting only from neoconservative sources, Liptak's piece reads like something drafted in Karl Rove's office. The word "torture" is never mentioned, only "highly coercive interrogation techniques." Even the story's headline is disingenuous. "The Court Enters the War, Loudly," elides the fact that it was the president and his lackeys who turned up the volume of this debate in the first place, with their remarkable assertions of remarkable power, and that the Court is merely obeying its constitutional mandate by responding.

And in a statement worthy of the wackos at FOX, Yoo calls Hamdan an attempt by the Supreme Court "to suppress creative thinking," and falsely characterizes the Court's decision as demanding that the president hamstrung his warmaking ability by consulting with Congress before he takes any military action whatsoever. "The mood music of this opinion so lacks the traditional deference to the president," another of Liptak's sources pines, a response echoing that of Clarence Thomas, who in his dissent to Hamdan complained that the majority "openly flouts our well-established duty to respect the Executive's judgment in matters of military operations and foreign affairs." But such deference on the part of the courts vis-a-vis the Executive has never existed, should not exist, and if there is any justice in this world, will never exist, and Liptak insults his readers by allowing such statements to pass unchallenged.

There are few issues more important today than presidential authority, an issue that reaches its tragic apotheosis in U.S. torture policy. For the nation's paper of record to insinuate that it is not the president, but the Supreme Court which has overreached by trying to slow the neoconservative juggernaut borders on a kind of moral treason.