Watering Torture Down

Why are the media so happy to use the T word in a child-abuse case?

By Dahlia Lithwick

Dick Cheney

There's a good deal of towel-snapping going on in the blogosphere today over rampant use of the word water-boarding to describe the punishment an Iraq war veteran meted out to his 4-year-old daughter. What is not in dispute is that Joshua Tabor, a U.S. Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months, was arrested on Jan. 31 and charged with assaulting a child for, among other things, holding his small daughter's head over a bathroom sink and dunking her for refusing to say her alphabet. Also not in dispute is that almost 200 media outlets, by recent count—including ABC.com, CBS.com, the New York Daily News, and the Daily Mail—used the word water-boarding in their Tabor story, often in the headline. Unwilling to go quite that far, other publications tried to make the same point a bit more subtly: AFP thus put quotation marks around water-boarding and USA Today's headline doubles down by using those same quotation marks plus the word mock. CNN.com, the outlier playing it safe, just stuck with abused.

So what is it the bloggers are yelling about? As Jared Keller at the Atlantic explains, a fight promptly broke out over whether Tabor's conduct is actually water-boarding, with Andrew Sullivan warning that "[n]o doubt Marc Thiessen [former speechwriter for George W. Bush] will object that since she wasn't strapped to an actual board and only dunked three or four times, rather than 183, and her father wasn't in the CIA, she wasn't really waterboarded." As Sullivan predicted, various right-wing bloggers flipped out because it isn't technically water-boarding if the victim isn't variously "strapped to a board" and the act isn't performed "by professionals in controlled conditions" while a "cloth is placed over the face and water is poured over the cloth."

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This is what happens when you have the media and the highest levels of government defending, promoting and justifying torture. Tom