A recent segment on WNYC, New York’s flagship National Public Radio (NPR) station, underscored not only the level to which public broadcasting standards have degraded during the Bush years, increasingly adopting the same intellectually dishonest frames and “fair and balanced” debate as those aired on commercial media networks, but also how, simultaneously, public broadcasting deceptively benefits from, and is protected by, its vaunted and entrenched reputation for providing quality information.
WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show hosted the segment “Is Waterboarding Torture?” preceding Judge Michael Mukasey’s controversial confirmation for U.S. Attorney General. On its face, of course, this frame is straight out of the worst of network news and commercial talk radio. In fact, host Brian Lehrer introduces the segment with a replay of MSNBC conservative host Joe Scarborough’s words:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, other people say torture doesn’t work, torture doesn’t work. And I’m not saying we need to torture. I’m just saying for the record, it is a matter of historical record that when we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, he started talking.
Lehrer jokingly chimes in, “Well, that pretty much sums up that debate, doesn’t it?” Yet he then uses Scarborough’s views as the launch pad for the segment:
LEHRER: Joe Scarborough on MSNBC talking about the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding. Lots of questions abound. Just what is waterboarding? Does it work? Is it torture? And waterboarding figures heavily in today’s news. The nomination of Michael Mukasey to the attorney general may well rest on his assessment of whether the technique does count as torture.
Contrary to an straightforward, informed assessment of this issue and absent a “balanced” right-wing talking head, Lehrer not only uses Scarborough as a surrogate partisan chatterer, but he himself intermittently assumes the role of foil to facts, history and common sense throughout the segment.
In introducing Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism analyst, author of the New York Daily News op-ed “I Know Waterboarding Is Torture - Because I Did It Myself” and genuine authority on waterboarding, Lehrer lends further credence to Scarborough’s ill-informed, intellectually dishonest and unconstitutional rhetoric:
LEHRER: So first on that clip of Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. I don’t know if you were able to hear it. But that conservative talk show host claimed that waterboarding is precisely what got Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, al Qaeda’s number two, to talk after 9/11. Do you know that to be true or false?
NANCE: I personally don’t that to be true or false. And as a matter of fact, it hasn’t really been confirmed by anyone. When the Washington Post sourced that article some time ago, one of the comments that was made was, anonymously, was that the information was actually, some of it, unreliable. And that’s generally what happens when you torture someone for information.
I would like to pose a similar question to Lehrer: Did you know that to be true or false? If not, why? The answer, what Nance states, was reported long ago. And if you knew the answer to the question before posing it, wouldn’t “Isn’t it true that…” be a more honest, less contrived frame? Why are you playing devil’s advocate when you’re supposed to be a clear conduit of public information?
It is well known that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was waterboarded (among other torture techniques) and confessed to just about everything but the Kennedy assassination and the invention of asbestos.
The next few exchanges between Lehrer and Nance are actually quite informative, and reveal what public broadcasting is capable of when the “fair and balanced” canard is dropped.
LEHRER: What was the situation that led you to learn how to waterboard and teach others?
NANCE: During my last years of military service, I was a, uh, instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. And this is a school in which we train U.S. service members to resist and be introduced to some of the various techniques that are used around the world in case that they are captured and become prisoners of war or terrorist hostages or hostile governments’ detainees.
LEHRER: So walk us through this a little bit. Your op-ed says that you have led, witnessed or supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. How do you do that?
NANCE: Well, even though it’s a very, very small fraction of personnel who might be selected for that activity. Over the time that I was there, we processed several thousand students through our school and one of those components is demonstrating a technique, a torture technique, which shows that a hostile government or a totalitarian nation has the ability to make you, to take you beyond your utmost ability to resist. And there are many other torture techniques which are far more brutal, but the waterboarding itself is a historically well-known torture technique. It was used in Vietnam, it was used in Cambodia and other places around the world.
[…]
LEHRER: Were you trained and were you training others to use it on others in actual U.S. government interrogations of detainees?
NANCE: No, absolutely not. As a matter of fact, that’s the thrust of my op-ed. We introduced the technique to students who may be at a high risk of capture. These schools have existed for decades. As a matter of fact, John McCain, Senator John McCain went to our school in Coronado, California, before he was shot down in Vietnam. But it just barely prepares the students who are going through. Now, we do not teach torture. Absolutely not. Now, how this technique came to be selected, if it is in fact selected as an enhanced interrogation technique, and had been used in Guantanamo or in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan, I’m not privy to how it transferred itself over to that. There are some media reports that it was taken directly from our manuals. However, we demonstrate what a totalitarian nation with a complete disregard for laws and treaties would do to prisoners. And that’s the thrust of my op-ed. Also, my op-ed in the Small Wars Journal, which started this whole ball. And which the comments that were made by Joe Scarborough on the Scarborough show, where they felt that it was a debate, that this was debatable whether this was a torture technique or not. And as somebody who’s gone through it and has had to perform the procedure, I know what it is and there is no debate as to whether it’s a torture technique. And that’s what I wanted to make very clear.
But Lehrer can’t seem to help himself. How does he follow up this momentarily unfiltered, thoughtful and educated discourse?
LEHRER: Let me play you a little more then of what Joe Scarborough said on his MSNBC show. Here it is:
SCARBOROUGH: That’s the debate: Is waterboarding torture? I don’t want the United States to engage in the type of torture that John McCain had to endure. But is waterboarding torture? If it’s in a controlled environment? If you have it done, instead of National Guardsmen from West Virginia like we had it at Abu Ghraib, if people that have been interrogating for twenty years, thirty years? I don’t know…”
Soon thereafter, Lehrer attacks Nance’s primary points – that waterboarding isn’t simulated drowning; the person on whom this technique is applied is drowning, and it is torture.
LEHRER: But since they never actually drown anybody, but just do it to induce the fear of drowning. I mean you said it is drowning.
NANCE: It is drowning.
LEHRER: But if people actually drowned, they would die. So they induce the feeling of drowning, they would say, induce the fear of that, and that coerces people to talk. Truthfully or not is another matter.
NANCE: Well, in fact, it’s not introducing the fear of drowning – because you are in fact drowning. Water is entering your lungs and your breathing process is starting to degrade throughout that period of time. So you in fact are just going through an extremely controlled drowning. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a professional or an amateur. I’ve seen waterboarding from Cambodia to the articles that were written of the war crimes on Japanese interrogators to Argentineans – it’s almost universal, the technique. It doesn’t matter whether you have a very nice board or whether you have it done on a concrete floor. You are going through a procedure which is debasing and painful. And if you want someone to comply, you’re going to get it. They absolutely will comply. However, this is not something which is, whether it’s a controlled environment or not, determines whether it’s torture or not.
Lehrer continues this nonsense when he’s joined by Karen Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU Law School, another well-informed guest beholden to the truth and the rule of law. (Incidentally, while I applaud Lehrer for bringing Nance and Greenberg on his show, how much credit does he deserve when he forces both to waste such a large amount of time responding to right-wing talking points? Again, the segment’s title - “Is Waterboarding Torture?” - is no mistake. It guides Lehrer’s decision-making process throughout and, wittingly or not, clearly reveals that debate for debate’s sake, rather than, say, drilling for the layered and complex truth, is what’s driving the proceedings. But imagine the depth of discussion if Lehrer were to drop this brain-dead and corrosive tactic. One that NPR, as does PBS, professes - most notably during the heat of fund-raising drives - is beneath them.)
LEHRER: And Karen Greenberg from the NYU Law School Center on Law and Security, what about that position? He is not yet the attorney general, and so he has not yet been classified, been briefed on this classified information of what specific interrogation techniques are used, aren’t used, what’s considered legal by the administration, what’s not. Is it unfair of the media, of the Congress, as the president says, to demand a specific answer from him?
GREENBERG: Absolutely not. They didn’t ask him if he knew what the techniques of the program were. They asked him a simple question: Is waterboarding in your opinion torture? That’s all they asked him. It’s not up to him to know the details at this point and that’s not, that wasn’t the line they were pursuing. And what President Bush and Dick Cheney yesterday did in their press conferences, in their speeches, was to basically say, “Look, you can’t hold somebody accountable if they don’t know,” and this has been a persistent theme throughout the Bush administration – this refusal to be accountable on the ground that no one has the facts. And on very many other grounds, but this is just their technique. "How can you accuse us of something if we’ve kept it secret?"
And it only gets worse:
LEHRER: Do you agree that there are degrees of waterboarding? And so, you know, again in Mukasey’s defense, he may not know to what degree this technique is actually used, how close to drowning somebody in the drowning experience, in actually filling their lungs with water, as our previous guest was describing, they actually go. Which also makes it difficult for him to take a position on whether the administration is using a torture technique.
GREENBERG: Waterboarding is designed to simulate drowning. So the degrees of it, whether it’s done well or not done well, that’s the goal of it. And that is why it is torture because torture is defined, in part, as that which simulates near death or the threat of death. And so I wouldn’t buy the degree thing. I want to say on this it doesn’t work thing. You know, to many of us, whether or not torture works is very much beside the point. Even if it does work, it is illegal. And it comprises so much in terms of our ability to effect decency and justice around the world. And our ability to not rely on a last-minute technique, but to get our information ahead of time and years earlier. There are many reasons to oppose torture beyond whether or not it works.
Eventually Greenberg appears to grow impatient with this contrived debate, the endless banality and futility of having to respond to one disingenuous talking point after another, and she finally pulls back the curtain on this farce:
GREENBERG: What’s going here in the debate…we’re losing sight of what the actual debate is about. The actual debate going on right now in Washington is about immunity. And about…and that’s the deeply troubling part of it, is there has been a cry for immunity, partially through the memos [the administration’s “torture memos”] from 2002, ’03, ’04 and ’05, that say, “Look, we would feel we need to implement torture techniques, however, we want to make sure everybody’s immune. However, we don’t want to bring this up for a public vetting.”
Lehrer, seemingly caught off-guard, replies, "Mmm."
Greenberg then shakes the wizard from his perch.
GREENBERG: And so this is really not a discussion about “Does torture work?” or Judge Mukasey. This is a discussion about how much immunity this government wants.
As if compelled to save face, Lehrer immediately responds (in the segment’s last seconds):
LEHRER: So, here, let me read you – we’re just about out of time – but let me read you one sentence from The New York Times editorial on this yesterday, where it says, “The only information Mr. Mukasey can possibly be lacking is whether Mr. Bush broke the law by authorizing the CIA to use waterboarding. A judgment the White House clearly does not want him to render in public because it could expose a host of officials to criminal accountability.” So, legal bottom line, do you think that’s what’s going on here?
Of course, that's how Lehrer should’ve framed the discussion from the start. Instead, he spends thirty minutes burying the actual lede, which Greenberg disinters in the final moments, exposing the inherent charade of the entire segment.
Greenberg replies, “I absolutely think that is the fear of the Bush administration,” generously omitting that, in essence, it's the point she just made.
Finally, Lehrer not only relies on himself, Joe Scarborough and administration talking points to play foil to his two unimpeachable guests, but also leans on his callers, who, quite dubiously, just happen to be woefully uninformed and/or heavily right-leaning (not an easy task in these parts, mind you):
DALE IN SEAFORD HARBOR: Oh, hi Brian, this is a great segment. I have two quick comments. One, I think there are degrees of waterboarding, so you can get wet or come near drowning. [Dale seems to have confused waterboarding with a bath.] And comment two: it doesn’t work. A better way to interrogate a suspect is to become friends.
[…]
STACEY IN JERSEY CITY: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I am really disturbed at this entire ordeal. To answer the question, I think that this confirmation should be approved. The attorney general, or the prospective attorney general, should not be put in such an unreasonable position to give his opinion about a practice that isn’t new to the Republican Party. [Freudian slip or ironic malaprop?] I resent the implications that the Democrats are doing this, you know, for justice, we are really are going to stick by the law. I would like to know when you are in that position, when you have a bunch of murderers who are out to kill us, what are you supposed to do? Have tea and just please beg them to be forthcoming with the truth. [If that isn’t enough…] This is exactly why, as an African-American, I left the Democratic Party. They’re hypocrites.
[…]
STEVE IN WOODMERE: Good morning. You know, it seems to me that the Democrats, what they’re looking for, is they want to, you know, appoint someone who’s going to answer all the questions just the way they want it done. I thought Mr. Mukasey’s answer was very clear. He said, “Torture is illegal. I don’t know what waterboarding entails so I’m not going to put myself out and tell you that it is illegal.” Now, Mrs. Greenberg, she thinks, uh, that she’s some sort of an expert on how to deal with terrorists and how to get information. [Uh, because she is?] I don’t know what kind of experience does she have. It doesn’t work just the way, you know, just because she says this is what should be done, that’s how it’s going to work. There are a lot more details to getting information from terrorists than what she’s suggesting.
My question? Why does Brian Lehrer think “Is Waterboarding Torture?” a viable frame for this topic? Needless to say, they happened to run out of time before getting to that one. And certainly, too, the questions of other informed tri-state area residents who objected to Mr. Lehrer’s “fair and balanced” handling of waterboarding.
Incidentally, under “Statement and Principles” in the NPR News Code of Ethics and Practices, it says:
"Fair" means that we present all important views on a subject. This range of views may be encompassed in a single story on a controversial topic, or it may play out over a body of coverage or series of commentaries. But at all times the commitment to presenting all important views must be conscious and affirmative, and it must be timely if it is being accomplished over the course of more than one story.
The phrase “all important views,” of course, raises more questions than it answers. It’s not clear what constitutes all important views in the eyes of NPR - the legitimacy of what is being said, the prominence of the speaker, both, or either? Rush Limbaugh, for example, is a well-known figure, but he prevaricates for a living, viciously, amorally. Bush administration officials, from the top down, have been caught in serial lies and unconstitutional tactics for years, but what they say must fall under “important views”; yet if their statements are steeped in patent subversions of the truth, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and international law, is it “fair” to present such views to guests and the listening audience as if they should be given equal time and weight? As evidenced in Lehrer’s segment, doesn’t that, rather, often work to obfuscate the truth, mislead listeners and give cover to those who actively promulgate specious information?
Is that fair? Is that even sane? Isn't that the opposite of what a free press - especially via public broadcasting - is charged to provide to its citizens?