Mona Charen, writing on National Review's blog, complains about the directness of a Washington Post headline this morning:

The Post’s headline on its Cheney series this morning (in the print, not online edition) is stunning: “The Unseen Path to Cruelty.” I admit that I haven’t read the entire article (life is too busy and too short to spend valuable time reading 200,000 word Post articles) but I’ve read enough to understand that today’s installment concerns the treatment of detainees. “Cruelty?” That is much too freighted a word to appear in a news headline.

Or is it?  There are some limits to engaging in media criticism based solely on headlines.

This becomes clear when you get to the 12th paragraph of the Post article, from which the headline was presumably drawn: 

In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."

This is, of course, only one (very high-level) person's account; someone else who worked on the legal framework could certainly challenge Mora's version of events.  Charen, however, not only fails to find anything contradicting Mora's statement, but completely ignores the article's quotation of him; one can only assume she really did just read the headline.

Even if the National Review crowd doesn't trust (or chooses to ignore) Mora's account, it's incredibly difficult to see the headline as a stretch given that Cheney very specifically and very publicly sought counter-terrorism exceptions to Senate legislation forbidding "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".  It does not take much thought to see how seeking exemption from a law prohibiting cruelty might take us very far down that path.  The headline might just as well have referred to "The Very Visible and Widely-Reported Path to Cruelty."