The US has been calling its efforts to legalize "torture lite" legalizing "aggressive interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation." This is the use of camouflage language. This is done when people who are ideologues, and who believe in ruthless ends justify means behavior that they know is immoral and illegal, want to disguise their intentions. The folks in this administration want this sort of thing to continue. They also know that if they use the cruder and more explicit language both their minions and the general public will balk at their designs. (see this article(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601023.html) for a discussion of this) And I wrote about this more than a year ago:
This article notes: "You can't blame the CIA for demanding clear authorization. It reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours." These are all explicitly under the definition of torture as defined in the Geneva Conventions, and also as defined under US law. However, by parsing the language and keeping it opaque enough, the lawyers of the administration could maintain that they could argue in court that it wasn't actually torture. For example the pain of standing in one position for a long time was "self-inflicted," the sensation of drowning wasn't actually drowning, etceteras...
But as I noted (quoting others) in long ago posts this is a pack of lies:
Torture I
Torture II
As long as these interrogations are not subject to judicial review, are kept secret, and the people so tortured have no legal recourse, it didn't matter that they were illegal methodologies. That is the real crime of this congress in going along with the Administrations plans. They used "deliberately opaque" language to try to keep those secrets making them complicit in the behavior. Even, to his shame John McCain, who voted for it after a "compromise" that wasn't a real compromise. In this they were following the pattern of many other large inhuman projects. Such as that of the Wannsee Conference, where the author Lawrence Rees writes:
"The minutes of the Wannsee conference are deliberately opaque. Eichmann's draft of them was worked on several times by Heydrich and Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo, to create that exact effect. Since they were intended for wider distribution, it was necessary for them to be written in camouflage language: those who understood the context would realize exactly what was intended, whilst the lack of crude terminology would mean they would not shock the uninitiated should they catch sight of them. Nonetheless they remain the clearest evidence of the planning process behind the Nazis' "Final Solution" and the strongest evidence of widespread state complicity in the murders that were to follow. [page 95]" (for more see BBC interview)
The point is that the very use of such language is usually visible evidence that someone is engaging in a criminal enterprise. When I hear such language used I don't think "Oh its not so bad" I think, oh my God, these are criminals.
I only pray that the democrats will start investigations in December.
Chris
Posted by cholte at October 18, 2006 08:01 PM