Bush, Orwell

It's a shame that invocations of George Orwell are so cliched, because sometimes the government does something that really and truly is "Orwellian", and yet when you point this out it doesn't ever seem to make much of an impact.

There has been a conversation brewing on the internets about a dilemma, which is this: it's pretty clear that the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes, and yet it is also pretty clear that prosecuting Bush administration officials--and Bush himself--is a political non-starter. Such an attempt to prosecute by the Obama administration would bitterly divide the country and completely derail the legislative agenda. So it's a bit of a pickle.

But in the meantime, various folks have been convincingly calling out the way in which--yes--Orwellian language surrounding torture has obscured public debate on the subject. Glenn Greenwald (definitely worth reading in full):

...[A] major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

Hence: "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals. "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture." And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says: "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

And in the NYT Opinion pages, Roger Cohen:

Of the 770 detainees grabbed here and there and flown to Guantánamo, only 23 have ever been charged with a crime. Of the more than 500 so far released, many traumatized by those “enhanced” techniques, not one has received an apology or compensation for their season in hell.

What they got on release was a single piece of paper from the American government. A U.S. official met one of the dozens of Afghans now released from Guantánamo and was so appalled by this document that he forwarded me a copy.

Dated Oct. 7, 2006, it reads as follows:

“An Administrative Review Board has reviewed the information about you that was talked about at the meeting on 02 December 2005 and the deciding official in the United States has made a decision about what will happen to you. You will be sent to the country of Afghanistan. Your departure will occur as soon as possible.”

That’s it, the one and only record on paper of protracted U.S. incarceration: three sentences for four years of a young Afghan’s life, written in language Orwell would have recognized.

We have “the deciding official,” not an officer, general or judge. We have “the information about you,” not allegations, or accusations, let alone charges. We have “a decision about what will happen to you,” not a judgment, ruling or verdict. This is the lexicon of totalitarianism. It is acutely embarrassing to the United States.

Chilling? Yes. Disturbing? Yes. Outrageous? Definitely. Of course, everyone sounds like a high school sophomore when making these arguments, so it's hard to get through to anybody.