Look To The Language

The precondition of the Bush-defenders' cynical anti-realism is a rhetorical indecency worthy Orwell's favored examples---"Marshal Petain was a true patriot"; "The Soviet Press is the freest in the world"; "The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution"---of tortured political speech (pardon the pun).

I refer to Orwell, because, as usual, he has something to teach us about our own polittical culture. The pattern of defense for Bush, Gonzales, Bybee, et al., of which I have yet to see an exception,* runs something like this: The atrocities that took place in prisons under American auspicies and at the hands of American officials are to be understated and obfuscated; but where the evidence of misconduct piles so high that ostrich-like denial and scapegoating of the liberal media are self-evidently absurd, a new argot of lifeless metaphors and abstruse technical verbiage must be conceived. Thus we replace "torture," which decent folk who love their country still oppose, with "coercive interrogation," which no decent folk who love their country could oppose.

"Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them." Thus Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language" (the greatest essay ever on either subject). "The inflated style is a itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details." The way to defend torture is not to defend "torture." It is to make sure that any photographs of sadism in action are junked in favor of a meaningless cacophany of nonse words printed in Courier typeface.

The other way to defend torture is through a reverse dishonesty. Whereas the purpose of the description of the various abuses is to obscure the nature of those abuses, there is a discourse of hypothetical scenarios abundantly vivid and aimed at convincing us that "coercive interrogation" is the moral thing to do. You've already heard the examples. A nuclear bomb is set to detonate in New York City. The CIA has apprehended the mastermind behind the plot. They know he knows the bomb's location, and they have half an hour to get it out of him. How could you oppose torturing our hypothetical would-be mass-murderer?

Notice already that the Latin vocabulary and wilderness of legalese have given way to a folksy, highly descriptive, matter-of-fact idiom. This shift is the first sign that something here is rotten. Bush's Republicans are in the process of doing something astonishing: using language to transform real events of the real world into an indiscernable blur, while rendering an imagined scenario that has never actually occurred into something "real," concrete, and determinative of moral obligations.

I will address the hypothetical as presented, however, because I've seen too many pathetic "torture-opponents" on cable news agreeing, in principle, that there are cases like these in which torture would be justified. Of course they are not. The "ticking-time bomb," however it's phrased, is simply bollocks. If terrorists have set something to happen in half an hour, it's going to happen. Torture takes days, weeks, and months to produce results. When it finally does, and it always, finally, does, the results it produces do not track the truth whatsoever. Any confession produced by torture is as likely to be false as it is to be true; in other words, the process is utterly unreliable and therefore of no utility at all. In fact, it is a guaranteed method of imploding the investigative system. Low-level intelligence operatives---the grunts who actually conduct interrogations---are not charged with coordinating raw intelligence with macro-strategic goals. Their job is merely to get that intelligence, and they will do so by the easiest path possible. (Remember your Milton Friedman?) Allow an exception for torture, and torture becomes the rule. There is no means of getting as much information out of detainees as torture will do by definition; and there is only one means of distinguishing credible information from non-credible, namely doing the legitimate investigative work that a system involving torture precludes.

J'Accuse. The Bush administration and its apologists are raping the English language. They are seeking a justification for the commission of an absolute evil. And they are increasing the chances of defeat in the war against jihadism.

*The exception is the outright approbation of torture from some quarters on the right. It is beneath comment or contempt. But it may not be quite so rare. I've personally received numerous mass-emails, from interlocutors whose identities I won't divulge, applauding the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and arguing explicitly that any mistreatment of prisoners whatsoever is entirely justified.