{"id":19490,"date":"2024-04-11T08:45:36","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T12:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=19490"},"modified":"2024-04-11T09:02:54","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T13:02:54","slug":"censorship-biden-era-torture-issue0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/11\/censorship-biden-era-torture-issue0\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Censorship the Biden Era\u2019s Torture Issue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>American Conservative, April 11, 2024<\/h3>\n

Is Censorship the Biden Era\u2019s Torture Issue?<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

\n

The word games around \u201ccontent moderation\u201d recall the days of \u201cenhanced interrogation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

During last month\u2019s Supreme Court hearing on a landmark case on federal censorship, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declared, \u201cMy biggest concern is\u2026the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.\u201d\u00a0Her comment was mystifying because that is the whole point of the First Amendment: to prevent government from nullifying freedom of speech and press.<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s assertion exposed the parallels between the current case on federal censorship of social media and the torture controversies from the George W. Bush era. Two decades ago, Bush administration lawyers secretly rewrote federal policies to assure that CIA interrogators were not \u201chamstrung\u201d when they sought to flog the truth of detainees.<\/p>\n

When the government heaves the law and Constitution overboard, euphemisms become the coin of the realm.\u00a0<\/strong>During the Bush era, it wasn\u2019t torture\u2014it was merely \u201cenhanced interrogation.\u201d Nowadays, the issue is not \u201ccensorship\u201d\u2014but merely \u201ccontent moderation.\u201d And \u201cmoderation\u201d is such a virtue that it happened millions of times a year thanks to the feds arm-twisting social media companies, according to federal court decisions.<\/p>\n

In the Bush era, torture was justified in response to \u201cticking time bombs. \u201c But the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2014 that harsh CIA interrogations never led to \u201cimminent threat\u201d intelligence<\/a>. That failure was irrelevant as long as a snappy phrase exonerated tearing out toenails, waterboarding (mock drownings), rape-like rectal feeding, and pummeling people to stay awake for seven days and nights straight.<\/p>\n

Instead of the \u201cticking time bomb,\u201d Jackson\u00a0last month touted mass suicide as the latest pretext for censorship in the Murthy <\/em>v. Missouri<\/em> case.<\/strong> Justice Jackson luridly warned of kids \u201cseriously injuring or even killing themselves\u201d by \u201cjumping out of windows at increasing elevations\u201d thanks to a social media \u201cteen challenge\u201d that the government would need to suppress.\u00a0And you don\u2019t want all the teenagers to die, right? Washingtonians presume the First Amendment is archaic because Americans have become village idiots who must be constantly rescued by federal officials.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For both torture and censorship, Washington policymakers were presumed to be the smartest people in the room\u2014if not the world.<\/strong> Yet the CIA regime was largely designed by two preening psychologists who had little or no experience conducting interrogations. The CIA ignored its own 1989 report conclusion that \u201cinhumane physical or psychological techniques<\/a> are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, the lead federal agency for online censorship\u2014the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)\u2014presumed that any opinion or statement that differed from federal policies and proclamations was misinformation. CISA simply asked government officials and \u201capparently always assumed the government official was<\/a> a reliable source,\u201d federal judge Terry Doughty noted in his decision last July. Any assertion by officialdom was close enough to a Delphic oracle to use to \u201cdebunk postings\u201d by private citizens.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

For both torture and censorship, there was almost zero curiosity inside the Beltway regarding what the government actually did.<\/strong> When the Bush administration railroaded a bill through Congress in 2006 to retroactively legalize some of its harshest interrogation methods, the Boston Globe<\/em> noted that thanks to restrictions on classified information, \u201cvery few of the people engaged<\/a> in the debate\u2026 know what they\u2019re talking about.\u201d Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump\u2019s first Attorney General, epitomized legislative absolution through absolute ignorance: \u201cI don\u2019t know what the CIA has been doing<\/a>, nor should I know.\u201d\u00a0(The American Conservative<\/em> was one of the few political magazines that did not sweep the scandal under the rug.\u00a0I wrote TAC articles on torture outrages here<\/a>, here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Similarly, when the Supreme Court heard the censorship case on March 18, the federal iron fist practically vanished. Most justices sounded clueless about the machinations exposed in earlier court decisions used to decimate the First Amendment.. In his July 4, 2023 ruling, federal Judge Terry Doughty delivered 155 pages of details of federal browbeating, jawboning and coercion<\/a> of social-media companies, potentially \u201cthe most massive attack against free speech in United States history.\u201d A federal appeals court followed up by issuing an injunction prohibiting federal officials from acting \u201cto coerce or significantly encourage social<\/a>-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce\u201d content.<\/p>\n

In the Bush era, people who were brutalized were vilified as terrorists, extremists, or enemy combatants. That blanket condemnation rested on a presumption of infallibility, as if\u00a0federal agencies could never torture an innocent person. The 2014 Senate report provided a deluge of examples of hapless victims horribly abused.<\/p>\n

Similarly nowadays, censorship is fine with many zealots as long as the targets are widely reviled groups such as anti-vaccination activists. Many pundits viewed Covid policy critics like southern sheriffs viewed civil rights protestors in the 1960s: They forfeited all their rights because they were up to no good.<\/strong> Federal officials presumed that any assertions that disagreed with federal proclamations (such as the false promise that vaccines would prevent Covid infections) were automatically \u201cmisinformation\u201d and could be suppressed.\u00a0Federal censorship extended far beyond Covid policy, suppressing disfavored comments on the 2020 election, mail-in voting, Ukraine, and the Afghanistan withdrawal.<\/p>\n

Will the Supreme Court drop an Iron Curtain to shroud federal censorship like it did torture atrocities?<\/strong> Two years ago, the Court entitled the CIA to continue to deny its outrages despite worldwide exposes of its crimes. The Supreme Court ludicrously declared that \u201csometimes information that has entered the public<\/a> domain may nonetheless fall within the scope of the state secrets privilege.\u201d Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, warning that \u201cutmost deference\u201d to the CIA would \u201cinvite more claims of secrecy in more doubtful circumstances\u2014and facilitate the loss of liberty and due process history shows very often follows.\u201d\u00a0Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court was granting the same type of \u201ccrown prerogatives\u201d to federal agencies that the Declaration of Independence describes as evil.<\/p>\n

In the Bush era, it was necessary to argue that torture was odious (alas, no one told President Donald Trump<\/a>)\u2014despite that being a self-evident truth throughout American history. In the Biden era, is it now necessary to argue that censorship is a bad thing? How in Hades did our national values go off the rails?<\/strong><\/p>\n