Torture and the English Language

Well, it’s official now. Bush has signed the Torture Without Habeas Corpus bill into law:

Bush Signs Terror Interrogation Law

President Bush signed legislation Tuesday authorizing tough interrogation of terror suspects and smoothing the way for trials before military commissions, calling it a “vital tool” in the war against terrorism.

If the facts of the story aren’t already chilling enough, consider the presentation: “tough interrogation” is apparently now an acceptable euphemism for torture (presumably it is only “tough interrogation” if the U.S. is doing it to a brown person, on the other hand the same techniques applied to U.S. citizens or proxies would be “torture most heinous”). Talk about newspeak.

And that’s the press doing the lingustic tomfoolery. It gets worse when the professionals start in…

“We will answer brutal murder with patient justice,” Bush said. “Those who kill the innocent will be held to account.”

The innocent, on the other hand, will answer to torturetough interrogation, and not have any legal recourse. Sigh.

I suggest everyone who had to read this kind of “spun” text should do some remedial reading first.

The press still does their bit though:

The law protects detainees from blatant abuses during questioning such as rape, torture and “cruel and inhuman” treatment but does not require that any of them be granted legal counsel. Also, it specifically bars detainees from filing habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions in federal courts.

Of course the law doesn’t really protect the detainees from any of these things–they were already protected from these things under a whole pile of other laws, so saying it again doesn’t do any good. However, what this law does do is explicitly change the definition of torture so that a pile of things that sane people would consider torture are not legally considered torture–and thus are now outside the protection that the press claims the law provides.

Back to Bush:

“The bill I sign today helps secure this country and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair and we will never back down from threats to our freedom,” Bush said. “We are as determined today as we were on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001.”

So, a law that legalizes torture and removes rights that all civilized nations have recognized for 700 years is proof of patience, decency, and fairness? Oh well, he invoked September 11th, so I guess I’ll just have to ignore that utter non-sequitor.

Halfway through the piece they finally show the other side of the debate, albiet in a he-said way, and not in an integrated-into-the-text way:

The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law is “one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history.”

“The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.

“Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act,” he said.

Oh, and if you read all the way through to the last paragraph, the article finally admits this:

The legislation also says the president can “interpret the meaning and application” of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts. White House press secretary Tony Snow said Bush would probably eventually issue an executive order that would describe his interpretation, but those documents are not usually made public and Snow did not reveal when it might be issued.

So, we’ve still got the “agressive interrogation” linguistic dodge, but at least they admit that international courts (code for “the rest of the civilized world”) would see these actions as illegal. And, in a nice bonus, they admit that the details of what kinds of torture Bush will make legal will be a secret.

Ain’t it grand to live under the Rule of Law?