The Wall Street Journal today published an article on the prospects for President Obama's nominee for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel Virginia Seitz. As the article notes, the Office of Legal Counsel “has been the center of ideological battles over national security during the past decade.”

The controversy is that during the Bush administration, the Office of Legal Counsel produced documents widely referred to as “torture memos.” Those memos approved waterboarding and said the president could, at times, ignore the criminal law outlawing torture and even the Fourth Amendment. But the Journal goes out of its way to avoid the word torture.

Heck, the Journal doesn't even say that Office of Legal Counsel OK'd “brutal interrogation techniques,” “harsh interrogation techniques” or “enhanced interrogation techniques.” (Even one of the foremost defenders of the Bush administration's actions, Marc Theissen, refers to “enhanced interrogations.”)

Rather, the Journal states: “the office produced legal opinions on interrogation and detention that endorsed methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency to question terror suspects. The Bush administration later withdrew several opinions, saying they were erroneous.”

Former New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has noted that the Times has been criticized for refusing to use the word torture, but rather using terms such as " 'harsh' techniques."

We must hope that the Journal hasn't gone even further than the Times and directed its news staff to refer to the CIA's use of waterboarding and other techniques simply as “methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency to question terror suspects.”