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.

Not about free speech

Roger Cohen has an op-ed today about a kerfuffle in France surrounding the firing of a political cartoonist:

The offending piece in Charlie Hebdo, a pillar of the left-libertarian media establishment, was penned last month by a 79-year-old columnist-cartoonist who goes by the name of Bob Siné. He described the plans — since denied — of Jean Sarkozy, 21, to convert to Judaism before marrying Jessica Sebaoun-Darty....

“He’ll go far in life, this little fellow!” Siné wrote of Sarkozy Jr.

He added, in a separate item on whether Muslims should abandon their traditions, that: “Honestly, between a Muslim in a chador and a shaved Jewess, my choice is made!”

[...]

Philippe Val, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, requested an apology from Siné, to which the veteran “chroniqueur” replied, with some brio it must be said, that he would much rather cut off his testicles.

That did it for Val, who promptly fired Siné, who shot back by bringing legal action against the paper for “defamation.”

Cohen believes that Siné crossed the line into anti-Semitism, but that he should not have been fired, arguing that such drastic action risks making Siné into a martyr and "stirring, rather than assuaging, what remains of French anti-Semitism". Fair enough.

But Cohen also criticizes the firing of Siné on free speech grounds, which I don't think makes any sense. Says Cohen:

I’m with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote in 1919 that: “I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

[...]

...I remain a free-speech absolutist. In that spirit, I defended the publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons. Curtailing speech is generally far more dangerous than allowing even vile views to be aired, not least by a cantankerous has-been like Siné.

I'm glad that Cohen feels so strongly about free speech, but it's not really applicable to the situation he describes. Free speech, after all, is the right of an individual to express viewpoints without fear of retribution from the government. It also imposes on government a duty to protect an expresser of unpopular viewpoints from violence or suppression at the hands of his fellow citizens. What free speech does not do is protect an employee of a newspaper from being fired by his editor. The cartoonist Siné ought to have the right to say whatever anti-Semitic thing he wants--but that doesn't entail a right to a megaphone to broadcast those views.

Those who accuse Charlie Hebdo of a double standard for printing the infamous "Muhammad Cartoons" and yet firing Siné for his offensive remarks are unclear on the same point. In the case of the Muhammad Cartoons, a Danish newspaper was materially threatened and intimidated by a large number of offended Muslims. Reprinting the cartoons in solidarity with that paper really was an assertion of free speech, because it forced the government to uphold its duty to protect those with unpopular views (although personally, I thought the reprinting unnecessary and a little overdramatic). Unless we interpret Siné's gig at Charlie Hebdo as a "right"--something that it is clearly not--I don't see how refraining from firing him for his offensive remarks stands up in any way for free speech or rights in general.

Of course, all that said, an editor may freely choose to adopt an editorial philosophy that borrows from the logic of free speech, and permit the staff to express whatever inflammatory views it wants, even if they contradict the publication's mission. Indeed, as Cohen suggests, there can be wisdom in letting unpopular views be expressed unhindered so that they can be properly discredited in the marketplace of ideas.

However, there are limits to this approach: an off-kilter remark now and again might be permissible, but if a consistent pattern of offensive bigotry emerges, the editor may want to rethink having such a person on staff. In this case it looks as though the editor Philippe Val did precisely that.