"President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency’s latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques."
New York Times 3/9/08President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed torture.
Ten words. Ten straightforward words as opposed to the thirty-eight in the above opening sentence to the
New York Times story. There’s a reason why the
Times uses triple the verbiage required. Journalists today are doing their best to edge around a truth too ugly for our media to confront directly. The writing must instead be carefully unfocussed so that it’s not about torture but about Bush’s “legacy,” about “strong executive power,” nice, bloodless terms that help stretch the sentence out and further dilute its actual meaning.
And of course the word “torture” must on no account be typed into that lead. “Harsh interrogation techniques” is ever so much nicer, since “harsh” is a word most frequently invoked to describe, not gross brutality, but a certain acerbity born of impatience, a brisk unwillingness to waste time with tact or unnecessary gentleness. Sending a very naughty child to bed without dinner is “harsh.” Chewing out an employee for making a stupid and expensive mistake is “harsh.” Even a jail is “harsh” and uninviting because, after all, it’s a jail, and the guy serving a few months for drunk and disorderly isn’t meant to enjoy his stint mopping floors and picking up trash along the highway.
Locking a naughty child in solitary confinement for a year, beating your employee to a pulp and tying up a convict naked and in a stress position for seven hours is a magnitude beyond the common usage of “harsh.”
“Techniques” is another nice bit of misdirection in that it dignifies torture by referring to it as a skill. I have no doubt that there are torturers who are very, very good at inflicting pain, but decent people – and decent governments -- consider that form of technical competence beside the point. The enormity of what he is doing as he pours another gout of water into the lungs of a bound, terrified prisoner makes the torturer’s boast, “Check out my technique,” at best a moment of dark satire.
This entire
New York Times piece illustrates two unsettling realities. First, we have reached the point where directly describing what is happening to our country is considered too inflammatory for a mainstream publication. Second, the way our craven media copes with this is by adopting the vocabulary of the administration and its apologists.
Note, as you read down the column, the language used to describe Bush’s veto which, we are told “deepens his battle” with the Democrats. Bush “…does not intend to bend in this or other confrontations on issues…unflinchingly defended an interrogation program…” and the veto “underscored his determination to preserve many of the executive prerogatives his administration has claimed in the name of fighting terrorism, and to enshrine them into law.”
He’s battling! He’s unflinching! He’s determined! He’s preserving, and fighting, and enshrining! You can almost see Bush standing on some imaginary promontory overlooking Washington DC, chest and jaw heroically thrust out, hand tucked into his shirt like Napoleon’s, the wind stirring his hair as the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays on the soundtrack and an American flag ripples in the background.
It’s only after this three-hundred-word clash of cymbals and blast of trumpets that the writers hunker down and begin to seriously discuss the gist of the piece, which is that President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed torture. For the next thousand words, the article describes in a relatively sober and lucid manner the actual issues surrounding this veto, though it does occasionally relapse into pallid discussion of Bush “protecting his legacy.” (What else can you expect in a quote from someone at the Brookings Institute?) Obviously I have no way of knowing for sure, but this article reads like the work of different people with different agendas.
Maybe those different people were the name listed on the byline, Steven Lee Myers, and the Mark Mazzetti listed as a contributing reporter. Maybe they were the actual writers and some uncited
New York Times editors calling the shots. For whatever reason, there seems to have been someone who wanted to write a story about this administration’s embrace of torture, and someone else who wanted to avoid the “inflammatory” writing necessary in such a piece.
Especially striking is the closing paragraph, which quotes Massachusetts Democratic Representative Bill Delahunt:
“They’re excellent at manipulating the arguments so that if Congress should assert itself, members expose themselves to charges of being soft, not tough enough on terrorism,” he said. “My view is history is going to judge us all.”
Indeed, it will. And at least one of the people involved in writing this article seems aware that this judgment is not going to be flattering.
There are pathetic people who truly are so clueless, so devoid of empathy and ethics that they don’t understand the objections to torture, and genuinely see Bush’s stand as heroic. Quite a few of these people are working in our media. But I think some people in our press are afraid, both for their jobs, and for what posterity will say about how they did their jobs. I think some people in our press are painfully aware of the extent to which they have corrupted and are still corrupting language in the service of murderous and indefensible policies.
As a writer, with a writer’s reverence for words, I’m reminded of a line from
Macbeth, the comment of a woman observing the tormented, sleepwalking Lady Macbeth as she tries to wash the blood of women and children from her hands.
“I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.”
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