Today, Dick Cheney gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. It’s well worth a read because it probably does represent about the strongest defense of Bush and Cheney’s post-9/11 policies as could be devised. His defense failed in nearly every respect, and much of it was disingenuous. But it’s an effort. One thing I want to focus on is Cheney’s discussion of euphemisms. I think you are familiar with the extensive use of euphemisms during the Bush administration. The Healthy Forests Initiative was pro-logging and the Clear Skies Act weakened environmental protection. Here is Cheney’s introduction to the subject:
Behind the overwrought reaction to enhanced interrogations is a broader misconception about the threats that still face our country. You can sense the problem in the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy.
Before we go any further I must stop to make an IRONY ALERT. The term ‘enhanced interrogations’ is a euphemism for torture. I know that Dick Cheney disputes that, so maybe we should be a bit more precise. Some enhanced interrogations like the belly slap and the attention grab are not torture. So, there is not a one-to-one equivalence between enhanced interrogation techniques and torture. Yet, however you want to parse things, it’s clear that ‘enhanced’ is word used to describe techniques that were considered impermissible and/or illegal prior to their adoption by the Bush administration. He might have adopted the phrase ‘illegal interrogation techniques’ instead of ‘enhanced’ and come closer to a fair description. Let’s examine this some more:
In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, “abducted.” Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.
But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Certainly, from the time of the Clinton administration we have occasionally gone into other countries and taken people into custody without the permission of the government there. This might be warranted in certain situations provided that we do not then render those people up for torture in another country (or ours). But what of a case like Khalid El-Masri?
Khalid El-Masri (also Khaled El-Masri[1] and Khaled Masri[2]) (born June 29, 1963) is a German citizen who was kidnapped,[3] flown to Afghanistan, interrogated and allegedly tortured by the CIA for several months as a part of the War on Terror. Afterwards he was released. This extrajudicial detention was apparently due to a misunderstanding that arose concerning the similarity of the spelling of El-Masri’s name with the spelling of suspected terrorist al-Masri[4] (the names are spelled the same way when using Arabic script).
What about the case of Maher Arar:
Arar was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis. He was held in solitary confinement in the United States for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer. The US government suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported him, not to Canada, his current home, but to his native Syria, even though its government is known to use torture.[5] He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured, according to the findings of the Arar Commission, until his release to Canada.[6]
The government of Canada ordered a commission of inquiry which concluded that he was tortured.[7] The commission of inquiry publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, and gave him a C$10.5 million settlement.[8] The Syrian government reports it knows of no links of Arar to terrorism.
What about the case of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr?
On February 17, 2003 Nasr was abducted by persons allegedly affiliated with the CIA as he walked to his mosque in Milan for noon prayers, thus becoming an effective ghost detainee. He was later transported to a prison in Egypt where he claims that he was tortured. Nasr’s case has been qualified by Swiss senator Dick Marty as a “perfect example of extraordinary rendition”.
What about the case of Binyam Mohamed?
On 10 April 2002, Mohamed was arrested at Pakistan’s Karachi airport – while attempting to fly to the UK – by Pakistani authorities as a suspected terrorist. Mohamed contends that he was a subject of the United States extraordinary rendition policy, and entered a “ghost prison system” run by US and UK intelligence agents.[6]
Before his transfer to Guantánamo Bay, Mohamed states that he was incarcerated in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, and that while in Morocco, interrogators tortured him by using scalpels or razor blades to repeatedly cut his penis and chest.[7]Mohamed was taken from Bagram airbase to Guantánamo Bay on 19 September 2004. He says that since then he has been “routinely humiliated and abused and constantly lied to”.
Surely, Dick Cheney would chalk these cases up to instances of irrational exuberance. That is, he might, if he were inclined to admit any error whatsoever. A case of mistaken identity is unfortunate, although we all know such things can happen. But all of these men were tortured. To complain about the word ‘abduction’ is itself a form of euphemism in these cases.
In his speech today, Cheney complained that some people have tried to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib with what was authorized in the Office of Legal Counsel memos.
In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
But this is another form of euphemism. The CIA was not uninvolved in the travesties at Abu Ghraib. And we know that the techniques used at Abu Ghraib were first honed at Guantanamo Bay.
Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women’s underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
One thing Dick Cheney needs to understand is that we all might collectively be forgiving of some of the mistakes he made in the aftermath of 9/11 if they were limited to some excessive surveillance and a little rough interrogation. But those are euphemisms for actions that led directly to the deaths of over 100 people in our custody and to Abu Ghraib and to torture by the Syrian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and United States governments. That’s the problem. That, we cannot forgive. We need no euphemisms for war crimes.
