more brilliance from The Wall Street Journal

Partial-Birth Interrogation
Clark Hoyt, "public editor" of the New York Times, reports approvingly that the paper's news pages have adopted an increasingly harsh approach when editorializing against the interrogation of terrorists:

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." (On the editorial page, they long ago added up to "torture.") . . .

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.

"Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away," said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that "brutal" was a better word. From rare use now and then, it had gone to being the preferred choice. The result of that decision was this top headline in the printed paper of April 17: "Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation." . . .

The Times should strive to tell readers exactly what a given interrogation technique entails. . . . But that is not always practical, as in a headline. When the paper needs a short description, the word brutal is accurate and appropriate, whether you think the acts were justified or not.

Contrast this with the way the Times, in a 2005 article, described the practice of "partly extracting an intact fetus from a woman's uterus and killing it by collapsing and removing the brain from the skull so that the fetus can pass through the birth canal":

Opponents of abortion refer to the method as partial-birth abortion and denounce it as brutal and uncivilized.

The headline reads "Appeals Court Voids Ban on 'Partial Birth' Abortions." Why not follow the same practice when describing interrogations of terrorists--namely, say that "opponents denounce it as brutal" and use the opponents' terminology in scare quotes (" 'Torture' ") when brevity is essential?

It couldn't be because the Times news reporters and editors, who are supposed to be impartial, are pro-abortion and anti-interrogation, could it?

Reader Pat Allen, commenting on our Friday item about torture and public opinion, raises a similar parallel:

As reported on the Pew website, they interpreted the results as follows: "Nearly half say the use of torture under such circumstances is often (15%) or sometimes (34%) justified; about the same proportion believes that the torture of suspected terrorists is rarely (22%) or never (25%) justified."

You mentioned that the results could be looked at as saying that 71% of Americans think torture is justified in some cases, while only one-quarter say it is never justified.

Let me suggest another way to interpret these numbers. I would look at it this way: 56% say torture is justified sometimes or rarely, 15% say it is justified often, and 25% say it is never justified. I would look at it this way because it seems to me that "often" and "never" are the extreme positions, while "sometimes" and "rarely" are just variations on a theme.

Also, when you look at these numbers this way, they compare interestingly to another set of numbers. Look at these numbers from a Gallup poll taken in May of last year: Do you think abortion should be: "legal under any circumstances," 28%; "legal under most circumstances," 13%; "legal only in a few circumstances," 40%; "illegal in all circumstances," 17%.

These numbers can be looked at two ways, also. A little under half (41%) think abortion should legal in all or most circumstances; a little over half (57%) think it should be legal under no or very few circumstances. But that is not the way Gallup combined the responses. Gallup isolated the "all circumstances" and "no circumstances" responses by themselves and combined the other two in a "legal under only some circumstances" category that gives you a middle ground of 53%.

Look at the breakdowns for the two issues: Abortion: 17-53-28. Justifiability of torture: 15-56-25. What these numbers say to me is not that the United States is divided evenly, as Pew said. Rather they say that there is a solid majority in the middle, with the more absolute positions on either end attracting only about a fifth to a fourth of the population.

There is a sensible middle position here, one that is neither pro-torture nor pro-terrorism: Let's keep enhanced interrogation safe, legal and rare.