Dan Froomkin: Fool Me Over and Over and Over Again

by Dan Froomkin, Niemanwatchdog.org

Our elite media has been repeatedly suckered into trumpeting glaringly unsupported assertions about the number of Guantanamo detainees that have “returned” to the battlefield. This was quite a week for it.

The most blatant and distressing previous object lesson came early last summer, when New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt appropriately spanked reporter Elisabeth Bumiller and her editors for a top-of-the-front-page story in late May that was “seriously flawed and greatly overplayed.” Hoyt wrote that the story, which appeared under the headline 1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds “demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically.”

Entirely by coincidence, of course, Bumiller’s article, based on a secret Pentagon report, provided a handy talking point for former vice president Cheney later that day, when he snarlingly attempted to rebut President Obama’s major address on national security speech later.

Bumiller’s reporting failure also earned her an editor’s note appended to her story, and a scolding op-ed.

And yet, amazingly enough, eight months later – now in the midst of attempts by Gitmo dead-enders to turn the aborted Exploding Christmas Underpants plot into a political cudgel – Bumiller is at it again, though this time chasing Bloomberg, et al., rather than leading the pack.

This time it’s one in five former detainees who have “engaged in, or is suspected of engaging in, terrorism or militant activity.” And here’s the sum total of what Bumiller learned from her previous experience:

Civil liberties and human rights groups sharply criticized the May 2009 report and earlier Pentagon reports during the Bush administration concluding that substantial numbers of former Guantánamo detainees had engaged in terrorism or militant activity. The groups said that the information was too vague to be credible and amounted to propaganda in favor of keeping the prison open.

But it’s not just that the Pentagon’s assertions are suspicious on their face. As it happens, a series of studies directed by Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux has been effectively picking them apart for years. (A response to the latest spate of stories will be coming out on Monday.)

Among the other (little, inconsequential) things the Seton Hall reports have pointed out is that the Pentagon, in all the times it has leaked on the topic, has nevertheless consistently refused to provide names that would allow anyone to actually verify most of its claims. There’s the issue of how they define “returning to the fight” – it apparently includes detainees speaking out publicly against their incarceration. There’s the fact that officials, if you press them, acknowledge they don’t really track former detainees – so this is largely speculative. And there’s the specious use of the term “return” – given that most of the detainees who were released weren’t found on the battlefield in the first place and were never formally charged with anything.

From Denbeaux’s December 2007 report:

The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that “just short of 30” former Guantánamo detainees have “returned” to the battlefield… but to date the Department has described at most 15 possible recidivists, and has identified only seven of these individuals by name. According to the data provided by the Department of Defense.. at least eight of the 15 individuals alleged by the Government to have “returned to the fight” are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government’s detention policies.

From his January 2009 report:

The Department of Defense does not keep track of released detainees nor does it follow their post release conduct.

Denbeaux calls this week’s outrageous Pentagon assertions the latest example of what he calls “numbers without names and trends without numbers.” He told me he’s outraged it’s been so widely picked up — including by the Times.

“I don’t see what the point is of a public editor criticizing a story for the New York Times if they’re going to republish it a year later,” he told me.

Gullible, amnesiac journalists are a dangerous thing. Is our profession really incapable of learning anything from its mistakes?

Pulsating diversity of views on the Post Op-Ed page

One of the leaders of The Liberal Media is a leading outlet for right-wing advocacy.
By Glenn Greenwald, salon.com, November 9, 2009

"I know many readers, particularly liberals, feel we have too many conservative voices on the page. On the other hand, I hear from a lot of conservative readers who think we have too many people they consider too liberal (Dionne, Robinson, Meyerson, Marcus, et al.). We try to provide a range of views--no matter who is in power" - Fred Hiatt, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor, October 14, 2009.

The Washington Post published a total of 8 Op-Eds and opinion columns today, from these individuals:

* Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey (bashing Obama for wanting to try 9/11 defendants in an actual court)

* Neocon Charles Krauthammer (heralding the resurgent GOP fueled by "Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt")

* Newt Gingrich and GOP Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Obama's health care plan would destroy America)

* Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson (Obama has lost the American center and his health care plan will destroy Democrats)

* Conservative economist Martin Feldstein, former chief economic adviser to Reagan ("Obamacare" will raise premiums and increase the number of uninsured)

* Honduran coup defender Edward Schumacher-Matos (blaming Honduras' democratically elected President for "instigating mob rule" and criticizing both the American Right and Left for "extremism," while defending the administration-backed compromise)

* CEO of BP (British Petroluem) Tony Hayward (dismissing efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption as "simplistic" and advocating changes to cap-and-trade bill that would benefit BP)

* Liberal Eugene Robinson (warning of the takeover of the GOP by the intolerant, ideological Right)

So, to re-cap: The Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America's largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist. That overwhelming right-wing presence on the Post Op-Ed page is anything but unusual (the day after it fired Dan Froomkin, The Post published Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Hayden, Charles Krauthammer and an Iran-hawkish screed from David Ignatnius, preceded by Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Ramesh Ponnuru). And that's to say nothing of the always-pro-war Editorial Page itself, which typically advocates for those same positions.

The Post is obviously free to publish whatever it wants, but, wth some very rare exceptions, its Op-Ed page under Fred Hiatt now really is the leading outlet for neoconservatve and related right-wing advocacy. It is one of those outlets typically counted as part of the "Liberal Media" by right-wing self-victimizers and their media amplifiers, yet The Post's claimed devotion to airing a "wide range of views" is scarcely more credible than Fox News' "fair and balanced" slogan.

"America's Priorities," by the Beltway elite

Endless war in Afghanistan is an absolute necessity. Health care for Americans is a luxury that can wait.

Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Oct. 24, 2009

Something very unusual happened on The Washington Post Editorial Page today: they deigned to address a response from one of their readers, who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in [their] editorial positions": namely, the Post demands that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money, yet the very same Post Editors vocally support escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for. "Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

The Post editors give two answers. They first claim that Obama will save substantial money by reducing defense spending -- by which they mean that he is merely decreasing the rate at which defense spending increases ("from 2008 to 2019, defense spending would increase only 17 percent") -- as well as withdrawing from Iraq. But so what? Even if those things really happen, we're still paying for our glorious, endless war in Afghanistan by borrowing the money from China and Japan, all of which continues to explode our crippling national debt. We have absolutely no ability to pay for our Afghan adventure other than by expanding our ignominious status as the largest and most insatiable debtor nation which history has ever known. That debt gravely bothers Beltway elites like the Post editors when it comes to providing ordinary Americans with basic services (which Post editors already enjoy), but it's totally irrelevant to them when it comes to re-fueling the vicarious joys of endless war.

The Post attempts to justify that disparity with their second answer, which perfectly captures the prevailing, and deeply warped, Beltway thinking: namely, escalating in Afghanistan is an absolute national necessity, while providing Americans with health care coverage is just a luxury that can wait:

All this assumes that defense and health care should be treated equally in the national budget. We would argue that they should not be . . . Universal health care, however desirable, is not "fundamental to the defense of our people." Nor is it a "necessity" that it be adopted this year: Mr. Obama chose to propose a massive new entitlement at a time of historic budget deficits. In contrast, Gen. McChrystal believes that if reinforcements are not sent to Afghanistan in the next year, the war may be lost, with catastrophic consequences for U.S. interests in South Asia. U.S. soldiers would continue to die, without the prospect of defeating the Taliban. And, as Mr. Obama put it, "if left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans."

Actually, a recent study from the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance documented that "nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance" in America. Whatever the exact number, nobody doubts that lack of health insurance causes thousands of Americans to die every year. If you're Fred Hiatt and you already have health insurance, it's easy to dismiss those deaths as unimportant, "not fundamental," not a "necessity" to tend to any time soon. No matter your views on Obama's health care reform plan, does it really take any effort to see how warped that dismissive mentality is?

But it becomes so much worse when one considers what we're ostensibly going to do in Afghanistan as part of our venerated "counter-insurgency" mission. In an amazingly enlightening interview with Frontline, military expert Andrew Bacevich explains what that supposedly entails:

I think the best way to understand the term "counterinsurgency" is to understand what the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps today mean by that term. What they mean is an approach to warfare in which success is to be gained not by destroying the enemy but by securing the population.

The term "securing" here means not simply keeping the people safe, but providing for the people a series of services -- effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of women's rights. That translates into an enormously ambitious project of nation building. . . .

John Nagl says that in effect we are engaged in a global counterinsurgency campaign. That's his description of the long war.

Now, think about it. If counterinsurgency, according to current doctrine, is all about securing the population, if securing the population implies not simply keeping them safe but providing people with good governance and economic development and education and so on, what then is the requirement of a global counterinsurgency campaign?

Are we called upon to keep ourselves safe? To prevent another 9/11? Are we called upon to secure the population of the entire globe? Given the success we've had thus far in securing the population in Iraq and in Afghanistan, does this idea make any sense whatsoever?

Can anybody possibly believe that the United States of America, ... facing a federal budget deficit of $1.8 trillion ... has the resources necessary to conduct a global counterinsurgency campaign? Over what? The next 20, 50, 80 years? I think [there] is something so preposterous about such proposals. I just find it baffling that they are treated with seriousness by supposedly serious people.

So according to The Washington Post, dropping bombs on, controlling and occupying Afghanistan -- all while simultaneously ensuring "effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of women's rights" to Afghan citizens in Afghanistan -- is an absolutely vital necessity that must be done no matter the cost. But providing basic services (such as health care) to American citizens, in the U.S., is a secondary priority at best, something totally unnecessary that should wait for a few years or a couple decades until we can afford it and until our various wars are finished, if that ever happens. "U.S. interests in South Asia" are paramount; U.S. interests in the welfare of those in American cities, suburbs and rural areas are an afterthought.

As demented as that sounds, isn't that exactly the priority scheme we've adopted as a country? We're a nation that couldn't even manage to get clean drinking water to our own citizens who were dying in the middle of New Orleans. We have tens of thousands of people dying every year because they lack basic health care coverage. The rich-poor gap continues to expand to third-world levels. And The Post claims that war and "nation-building" in Afghanistan are crucial while health care for Americans is not because "wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end." Except, as Bacevich points out, that's false:

Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.

What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that. War has become a permanent condition.

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who don't are abstract, distant and irrelevant. Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families don't fight the wars they cheer on -- and don't even pay for them -- and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever. Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described this Beltway attitude exactly:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . .

Lounging around in the editorial offices in the capital of a rapidly decaying empire, urging that more Americans be sent into endless war paid for with endless debt, while yawning and lazily waving away with boredom the hordes outside dying for lack of health care coverage, is one of the most repugnant images one can imagine. It's exactly what Adam Smith denounced. And it's exactly what our political and media elite are.

-- Glenn Greenwald

A Publisher Stumbles Publicly at The Post

By DAVID CARR

Katharine Weymouth, the relatively new publisher of The Washington Post, is a lawyer who worked for the company for 12 years and was educated at the Harvard School of Business, so she is hardly a naïf in running a business.

But she has never worked in a newsroom, a gap in her résumé that may have contributed to her current problems.

As first reported in Politico, The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home in which officials from Congress and the administration, lobbyists and, yes, the paper’s own reporters could have a quiet, off-the-record dinner, discussions to be led by Marcus Brauchli, the newspaper’s editor. Theoretically, you can’t buy Washington Post reporters, but you can rent them.

I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time. Access, and its very close cousin, influence, define the Beltway. Millions of dollars are spent on having the right lobbyists, flacks and lawyers so that you can end up in a room with people who control your destiny.

And in some respects, the now-canceled salon on health care seems like an attempt to replicate a golden era for the newspaper in which a seat at a dinner hosted by Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post and Ms. Weymouth’s grandmother, was the hottest commodity in the Beltway.

The difference? Mrs. Graham bestowed legitimacy (Richard M. Nixon never made the cut, even as president). Ms. Weymouth decided to sell it, with her paper’s editorial integrity apparently thrown in as a parting gift.

Perhaps Ms. Weymouth’s notion came up a year ago when she, along with senior Web and print editorial staff members went to Harvard to rethink The Washington Post brand. In response to questions about the salon, Ms. Weymouth sent a reply stating, “I take full responsibility. We will be publishing a note to our readers on Sunday.”

That might do a world of good for the paper. Initially, the salon controversy — we won’t give it a “gate” suffix out of respect for the newspaper that established the term — was explained away as the unfortunate result of an unvetted brochure sent out by an overzealous marketing employee (later identified as Charles Pelton).

But, as The Los Angeles Times pointed out, at least two of the invitations to political participants, Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, came from the personal e-mail address of Ms. Weymouth. Mr. Brauchli insisted that he had not realized the full implications of the events even though Mr. Pelton told The Post’s ombudsman that the plan was “well developed with the newsroom.”

The absence of a credible explanation, compounded a grievous wound to an important newspaper. The whole episode suggests a misreading of history that has been well covered by the paper but also, and perhaps worse, a tin ear to newsroom dynamics.

Let’s put this in context: Ms. Weymouth is confronted with the same crisis as every publisher in the country. The Web has robbed newspapers of paying readers and advertisers, the economic downturn is cutting into what is left, and smaller, nimbler Internet competitors are learning to slake the 24-hour news thirst on their own.

(The fact that it was Politico that broke this story only added to the sting. Started by two former Post reporters, Politico has become a serious competitor right on The Post’s inside-the-Beltway turf, and now has caught the paper on a fundamental lapse in the wall between church and state. In the increasingly heated race between the mainstream media and newer, digitally enabled ones, much of the remaining competitive edge for legacy media derives from a perception that they adhere to more rigorous publishing standards. Oops.)

So Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli are under tremendous pressure to innovate, both to cut costs and to increase revenue. Unfortunately, neither arrive at this critical point for the industry with much equity in the newsroom they lead, because they are both relatively new.

Ms. Weymouth has some inherited good will in part because she leads an organization that is not only family-owned but is also operated like a family. When Donald Graham was the publisher (and Bo Jones, who succeeded him) and Leonard Downie Jr. was the editor, they were both viewed as tradition-bound — boring even — but they both observed The Post tradition of winning over employees, not bossing them around.

Before the salon problem, however, Ms. Weymouth had made a series of decisions that had — fairly or not — kept her own newsroom at loose ends.

Her 17 months as publisher have been a period of upheaval, including rounds of downsizing that left the newsroom and other departments considerably smaller. She also oversaw the merger of The Post’s print and digital newsrooms after years of turf wars. She has made public comments praising The Huffington Post for its clever headlines, a compliment that did not endear her to reporters who see their own work splashed on or criticized on the Web site.

And she was widely seen as hastening the retirement of the longtime top editor, Mr. Downie. She then hired Mr. Brauchli, an outsider, to run a newsroom that had historically rewarded its own with the top job.

Mr. Brauchli with a deep, impressive résumé, including serving as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, has worked hard to retrofit The Washington Post for a new era. Mr. Downie was viewed as something of a traditionalist in the Ben Bradlee vein, an editor who managed the newsroom by walking around, making friends along the way.

Mr. Brauchli is not a high-touch guy, unless you count his BlackBerry. He has had to oversee the sharp cuts in the newsroom — a task that falls on many editors — but he has done so while attempting a radical reorganization of the newsroom that may do wonders in the long run, but has been unsettling for many.

His explanation for the salon mess — I planned to attend but did not understand exactly what the party was — has not helped.

“I believe Marcus didn’t know that this was going out, I don’t believe he would have approved it,” said Deborah Howell, the former ombudsman for the paper who is now a consultant for Advance Publications. “But I don’t see anybody taking responsibility for it, either. I’d like to know, as a reader and fan of The Post, how exactly this happened and so far, I don’t know.” (Ms. Howell made her comment before Ms. Weymouth accepted responsibility.)

Ms. Weymouth’s initial explanation for the salon fiasco, also broke another Washington Post tradition: those who are handed the sword generally fall on it when trouble comes.

During Watergate, Mrs. Graham took a lot of heat — including outright abuse — from the Nixon administration. After the Janet Cooke affair, Mr. Bradlee, the former editor, took the blame himself.

Ms. Weymouth’s excuse — that the salon brochure “completely misrepresented what we were trying to do” didn’t track with many reporters, who have already been contending with cutbacks at the paper.

“Oh really? Then what were they trying to do?” said one reporter who did not want to be identified as criticizing the publisher. “Yes, we should be in the business of seminars and conferences, but the issue for us is fraught because we cover Washington.”

Hank Stuever, a staff writer, said, “Katharine should expect the journalists who work for her to be disappointed and upset about this and should also understand that the details so far have been unsatisfying.”

“The people I know in the newsroom are still waiting for a lot better answer to what the goal was here, what was really happening with this idea, and how it got so far along without raising red flags,” Mr. Stuever added.

The reporters, no doubt, are looking forward to the note in Sunday’s paper. But they are also staring down the prospect of serving as a punch line in Beltway circles for many years to come. The president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has already obliged by wondering aloud at a news conference whether he could afford to take a question from Michael Shear, a Post reporter.

Funny stuff, unless you are the reporter with your hand up.

“Even if this was just an unvetted marketing blunder, The Post’s reputation has taken a huge hit in terms of the optics. When you have Robert Gibbs joking about it, that’s hugely embarrassing for the paper,” said Richard Leiby, acting arts editor of the newspaper.

It is true that reporters and editors in every newsroom chronically complain about the business side of the operation and that their personal ethics meter is always on code red. But Ms. Weymouth has learned a hard lesson, one that every publisher and owner should study and take note of. Innovations are great, rethinking old ways is smart, and even conferences — properly vetted — are fine.

But the newsroom remains a paper’s biggest asset. And you cannot afford to lose them, even when it means admitting that you, not some guy over in marketing, made a mistake.

http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=1094

by Barry Sussman, NeimanWatchdog.org

Dan Froomkin, deputy editor for Nieman Watchdog, has just been fired from his main job as writer of the online White House Watch column for the Washington Post. Dan will do just fine. He is talented, immensely productive, has sharp insight, good ideas and is a total self-starter.

The unanswered question is, why was he fired? He loved his work and developed a very large following.

The Post hasn’t given any good reason. As editor of Nieman Watchdog I’ve worked closely with Froomkin for 5-1/2 years, and I certainly can’t think of one. The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, wrote in his blog Thursday that editors wouldn’t comment and referred him to a PR person. She issued a statement that one of Alexander’s blog readers said was baffling, Stalin-like and Orwellian. It was all of those:

“Editors and our research teams are constantly reviewing our online content to ensure we bring readers the most value when they are on our Web site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Regrettably, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced to The Post’s Web site.”

Late Thursday the Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, issued a statement that Alexander added to his post, saying, “With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision.”

Froomkin is well-known online and his firing drew a quick, shocked reaction. By Friday morning more than 225 readers had appended comments to Alexander’s blog, the great majority of them infuriated with the firing.

Froomkin’s column is slated to run until late June or early July. He mentioned his firing in this morning’s piece, saying, “I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the readers who have e-mailed, blogged, commented, tweeted and left notes on my Facebook page. Your kind words and support mean the world to me.”

A Google search shows numerous articles on the firing.

The headline on Glenn Greenwald’s blog in Salon was, “The Post fires its best columnist. Why?”

“What makes this firing so bizarre and worthy of inquiry,” Greenwald wrote, “is that Froomkin was easily one of the most linked-to and cited Post columnists. At a time when newspapers are relying more and more on online traffic, the Post just fired the person who, in 2007, wrote 3 out of the top 10 most-trafficked columns.”

Ed Rollins: More Dirty Tricks (this time for Huckabee)

Note from Greetings: If you think Huckabee is a "down home guy", all you have to know is that Ed Rollins, part of the old Bush apologists and dirty tactics crew, is leading Huckabee's campaign. Read on.

The Sleuth, Mary Ann Akers, Washington Post, January 7, 2007

If you thought Iowa was full of dirty tricks, wait 'til you get a load of the fun Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee's campaign chairman has in store for New Hampshire!

A blogger for Townhall.com was the only other person in a little dive restaurant in Des Moines Thursday where the legendary political operative Ed Rollins happened to be dining with his wife - and, luckily for the blogger, talking (and cursing) loudly.

The blogger's notes are full of wonderful little nuggets, such as Rollins - who proudly considers himself a bare-knuckles bruiser - calling NBC newswoman Andrea Mitchell "sweetie," and telling CNN Immigration Czar Lou Dobbs that he'd be ready to have drinks with him after Iowa to strategize about "Hillary."

Rollins, while he munched on a tuna melt sandwich during his phone chat with Dobbs, also made reference to his now infamous comment about needing to check his temper around Mitt Romney "whose teeth I want to knock out." In the restaurant, according to the blogger, Amanda Carpenter, Rollins told Dobbs: "they are all porcelain."

Carpenter also writes that Rollins was telling his "blonde female dining companion" - who turned out to be Rollins' wife - that Rudy Giuliani is "done" and was "hurt terribly by those police cruises with his girlfriends." Rollins, in an interview later with Chris Wallace on Fox News, didn't deny saying any of this. (Click on this link to Townhall.com to see the Fox News video.)

While he "let the f-bomb fly twice," Rollins reportedly also "distinctly talked about going negative in South Carolina and told someone on the phone to 'put some good in there if you have to, with the bad. Do what you gotta do.'" Rollins also apparently indicated he believed Huckabee was the victim of "dirty tricks."

Well, bless his heart - as they say in South Carolina, where Huck apparently will do what he's gotta do to keep Christian evangelicals on his side.

The Humorists Get It

From Dan Froomkin's WashingtonPost.com blog:

There's nothing funny about torture. And yet the most insightful -- and certainly most succinct -- views on the subject, as usual, come from the political "humorists".

Here are cartoons by Stuart Carlson, Ann Telnaes, Mike Luckovich, Steve Benson, Tony Auth, Rex Babin, Bill Mitchell, and John Sherffius.

Here's video of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart bitterly playing the game: "Cruel, Inhuman, Degrading or O-Tay."

Stewart also shows White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend telling CNN on Thursday: "We start with the least harsh measures first. It stops after -- if someone becomes cooperative." But as Stewart points out, that's not a refutation of torture. "That's how you do it. It wouldn't work the other way around."

And John Oliver explains administration policy to Stewart: "If we do do those things, they must not be torture."

Stewart: "So words, in and of themselves, have no value?"

Oliver: "Wow. Wow. I'd have thought you'd at least support our words, Jon. . . . Our brave, fighting words who've been serving this country since this war on terror began, many of them making the ultimate sacrifice: Losing their definitions.

"Words like torture, victory, surge, mission, accomplished. Once filled with purpose, now signifying nothing."