Euphemistic terminology shirks responsibility
The golden rule of scummy politics is this: if you’re going to do something to screw over vast swathes of the American populace, you had better make sure that they have no idea what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.
If your particular crime has a precise and well-known name, like, say, voter intimidation, make sure that you have your pocket media wizards handy. Have them come up with a new spin: perhaps “modified community outreach” or “demographic blitzing.”
And if your crime happens to be torture, you had better find something appropriately anodyne very quickly.
Which is exactly what happened, after September 11 turned the New York skyline corpse-black and made the “simulated drowning” of suspected individuals not just permissible but positively necessary. (More on this in a bit.)
What did the government and compliant press call this disregard for the Eighth amendment? “Enhanced interrogation techniques.” Say that out loud. It has a beautiful sort of melodic flow. Eight syllables that have a definite start (en-hanced,) rise (in-tero-ga-tion) and resounding fall (tech-niques.) It’s also so vague and mushy that the process could describe anything from bribing prisoners with candy to blasting “Barney” music at them day and night until they go mad with purple-dinosaur anxiety terror.
(But at least it’s better than “tor-ture” right? Such an ugly word.)
I’m getting to the point, I promise, but bear with me for a second. How we choose to define our actions is just as important as the actions themselves. If we opt out for the more wobbly and imprecise phrases like “enhanced interrogation,” then we lose the gravity an act of torture entails.
We lose our responsibility in the ever-widening loopholes we stretch for ourselves, which, in the long view of history, will become nothing more than nooses-in-waiting for our own necks.
There is no other word for waterboarding than “torture.” Anyone who has seen the video of journalist Christopher Hitchens subjected to the process will know how weak that catchphrase is when compared to the brute reality.
As one watches his body convulse and struggle for breath, the popular description of waterboarding as “simulated drowning” seems as far away as those press wizards who came up with that fatuous term.
As Hitchens wrote in his Vanity Fair piece on the incident: “[Simulated drowning] is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning — or, rather, being drowned.”
Now, 13 years after 9/11, our elected commander-in-chief has called what our government did “torture.” Obama acknowledges that “we did some things that were contrary to our values,” which, though vague, is an important statement on where American values should be. However, he warns us against being “sanctimonious” about doing things thought necessary in a more dangerous time.
If we desert our values, even once, in a time of desperation and danger, we are more than capable of doing it again, using the “extreme times/extreme measures” expediency. Holding one’s values close to one’s chest only means anything if one is willing to do what they demand even in the most troubling times. Otherwise, values are nothing but useless driftwood to be used in the event of a catastrophe, easily discarded once relative safety is found.
I won’t go into the arguments that torture is ineffective, and yields as much junk data as good data. (Hitchens himself, while under the process, understood that one would say anything to stop the water from streaming into your nose and mouth.)
The point here is this: if words are to hold any meaning, they have to reflect some semblance of the truth. When we say, “we tortured them” we have to be able to recognize what that means, and what that says about our society and ourselves.