BobHarris.com - U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture

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U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture

Tag it now -

Friday, 03 December 2004

Why the world is freaked out by the Bush administration, writ large, for the umpteenth time:

Evidence gained by torture can be used by the U.S. military in deciding whether to imprison a foreigner indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an enemy combatant, the government says.

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence...

UPDATE: URL fixed, thanks; have no idea why the LA Times link changed.

But other weirdness: in the link recommended in the comments (and many others -- ABC News and USA Today, for example), the AP has changed the first graph's ending from "the government says" to "the government concedes."

Which rather changes the meaning of the story, misleadingly so: instead of insisting on the propriety of the Bush administration's actions -- clearly the official position -- the new wording implies that evidence extracted by physical distress is all some sort of unintended, inadvertent, gosh-that's-too-bad mistake.

Bullshit. And AP's correction (or whatever they want to call it) is propagating the bullshit.