dokrent - 3:09 PM ET June 1, 2004 (#30 of 30) 'Torture' vs. 'Abuse' In The Times's Coverage of Iraq Prisons
As aggressive as Times reporting can sometimes be, it doesn't always find a parallel in the paper's use of language. The Iraq prison story is an excellent example, as many readers have noted: articles over the last few weeks have established the extent of the scandal, and have included many pieces of first-person testimony from former prisoners. But the language used in news articles to characterize what went on at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere remains, at least in headlines, comparatively delicate.
The specific issue is the use of "abuse" rather than "torture" to describe certain actions of American military personnel, intelligence officers, and private subcontractors. I asked assistant managing editors Craig Whitney and Allan M. Siegal for comment as they are, respectively, in charge of the news desk (where front page headlines get written) and all matters of language and style. Both were surprised when I raised the issue; both noted some substantive definitional distinctions between "abuse" and "torture"; both asserted that there is no Times policy one way or another; and both acknowledged that readers may be right.
Wrote Whitney in an e-mail message, "Now that you tell me people are reading things into our not using 'torture' in headlines, I'll pay closer attention."
Personally, I was torn - until a conversation I had last week with a reader from Germany. Absent any clear definition, I felt, it seemed reasonable to use "abuse" if it helped keep temperatures down, much as the use of "militant" instead of "terrorist" in the Palestine-Israel conflict suggests a sometimes misplaced wish neither to take sides nor to be inflammatory (many supporters of Israel feel very differently about this, and I expect to address the specific issue in a future column).
But just as a terrorist is sometimes, in fact, a terrorist, torture is inescapably torture. The reader who moved me out of the muddled center on this did it with a simple question: "If the same things [that happened at Abu Ghraib] had been done to American prisoners by Iraqi authorities, would The Times have hesitated to use 'torture' over and over again?"
Over the past five years, the paper has used the word to describe the actions of authorities in Iraq, China, Mexico, Turkey, Chad and elsewhere, including a precinct house in Brooklyn, in the Abner Louima case. In each case, I believe, there was a sense that the torturers were characterized, in part, by their otherness - other nationalities, other political systems, or in the Louima instance other, depraved moral codes.
In Iraq, the perpetrators of the prison horrors were our representatives - ordinary Americans whose behavior may have been altered by circumstances, but who in their origins and histories are as familiar to us as our neighbors and co-workers.
Siegal, who notes that The Times has no policy on the use of "torture," cautioned me in an e-mail that his sense of the word (and of "abuse") was "impressionistic rather than researched," but I buy what he ended up with: "torture occurs when a prisoner is physically or psychologically maltreated during the process of interrogation, or as punishment for some activity or political position. Abuse occurs when the prisoner's jailers maltreat her or him separately from the interrogation process."
Siegal also acknowledges that there's a continuum that has to be measured. If, for instance, a man is kept hooded for an hour, is that in itself torture? What about five hours? What about 24? If the headline language has in fact been delicate, maybe that's because the distinctions are delicate. But as good reporting brings us greater knowledge of what has gone in prisons and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions become firm enough to be indisputable.
Note the description the paper used on Monday, May 31, in a chart explaining the deaths of various detainees in Iraq prisons: "Cause of death was a blow to the head and 'compromised respiration.' Died during an interrogation process by Navy Seals and C.I.A. employees."
If that's not torture, then The Times might just as well call it a game of tag.