Witches of Torture

Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Saturday 13 May 2006

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Evidently Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish is not particular with whom he takes his cups with. His latest torture dispatch quotes and links to the defrocked journalist Jason Leopold (see above) whose work cannot be trusted.

And here too there appear to be problems with the Leopold piece to which Sullivan links, and I'm not talking about the casual use of the word torture by yet another lefty agenda reporter. We expect that. We expect them to have little reverence for the language in pursuit of their ends. But when they put their words in the mouths of others something must be said. And it appears Leopold has done that. This is the opening paragraph of his report:

CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily "torture" updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged "high-level" terrorist detainee, who was held at a secret "black site" prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by this reporter.

The problem here is pretty simple. Leopold puts torture, high-level, and black site in quotes, indicating they are words taken from court documents. However, this is very misleading. Reading the whole piece one cannot help but to conclude that the phrase "daily 'torture' updates" is the concoction of Leopold himself, in the sense that it is he, Leopold, who is characterizing the subject of these communications torture.