This passage is the second time Shepard described waterboarding with the pleasant-sounding, clinical, minimizing phrase: "poured water down a detainee's mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds." Note the other nice-sounding descriptions for what the U.S. did ("forced to stand for hours along side a wall"; that almost sounds peaceful, like a yoga pose: "along side a wall").

Aside from the obvious political bias, which Glenn explores at length, there is another dimension to the problem even if such bias doesn't exist. It isn't that I need the writers' opinion on the facts. But I do need the facts to be clear. I wrote about this in an earlier post:

[T]here's a reason why Billmon called it Pravda on the Hudson: we have to spend way too much time these days deciphering the news pages as if they are a bunch of ancient druid runes. I spend hours here and at other blogs trying to read between the lines and figure out what these reporters "really mean" because the conventions of modern journalism are so arcane that you have to be some sort of insider or psychic to know what the hell is actually going on.