Unspeak
Page 16
The news media made an explicit and considered choice about what to call those who continued to use violence. Recognising on the one hand that the Bush–Blair use of ‘terrorists’ was propaganda, and that any use of ‘resistance’ on the other hand could look as though it conveyed approval, almost everyone converged rapidly on the term ‘insurgents’. The description ‘insurgency’ – literally, rising up within – captured the sense of what one reporter on the ground was by the end of 2004 calling ‘a genuine and popular insurrection’44 in Iraq, while at the same time expressing no approval, as it does not with Scheuer’s description of Al Qaeda as ‘insurgents’. It also chimed with the fact that ‘a leaked Foreign Office memo of May 2004 noted that the insurgency had “a reservoir of popular support, at least among the Sunnis”.’45
US forces in Iraq referred to the insurgents as AIF, for ‘anti-Iraqi forces’46, which was cute, but tended to gloss over the fact that, as of September 2004, the ‘anti-Iraqi forces’ (comprised principally of Iraqis) had since the end of the war proper killed only half as many Iraqis as had the Americans and their allies: ‘Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis – most of them civilians – as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry.’47 Soldiers in Iraq, as well as reporters, agreed that the problem was far broader than a few ‘determined killers and terrorists’, as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice characterised it.48 Christopher Hitchens argued against the use of the word ‘insurgents’, suggesting that, instead, ‘Baathist or Bin Ladenist or jihadist would all do’49. The problem was that although some of the perpetrators of violence in Iraq did fit into one of those categories, not all of them did. And in many cases it was impossible to know whether they did or not. In June 2005, the overall commander of the forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, stated categorically that, as well as former Ba’athists and Al-Qaeda-inspired fighters, the ‘insurgency’ included a ‘broader group’ of Iraqis who ‘want[ed] to see all foreign forces leave the country’.50 Indeed, this category of fighters was referred to internally by the military with the unambiguous phrase POI – ‘pissed-off Iraqis’.51 So a general term such as ‘insurgents’ seemed useful. In July 2004, intelligence officer Major Thomas Neemeyer, with the US First Infantry Division in Iraq, had summed up the problem vividly: ‘The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind would be to kill the entire population.’52
To resist the use of ‘terrorists’ in this case, and to insist on the word ‘insurgents’, was not to express approval of car-bombings that killed civilians, or even of the killing of soldiers. It was equally important to refuse to talk of a ‘resistance’. The media’s adoption of the most politically neutral terminology may even have caused some at the top to adopt the prevailing language: in September 2004, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was referring to ‘the assassins and the terrorists’53 in Iraq; eight months later, he referred to the ‘insurgency’.54 The case of the ‘insurgents’ was a small triumph of journalistic resistance to propagandistic terminology.
Terrorist suspects
Such small triumphs, however, go hand in hand with a continuing carelessness even in closely related contexts. In the debate about how to combat the threat of terrorism in Britain and the US, one highly loaded phrase that has so far slipped the net is the very common ‘terrorist suspects’, which has become the norm to describe those who attract police interest. It is used freely both by those who defend detention without trial and by those who argue for the conservation of civil liberties. It appears in apparently innocuously neutral contexts such as the following newspaper report: ‘The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, will also urge further debate on the use of ID cards to track terrorist suspects during an interview on BBC’s Breakfast with Frost programme.’55 Even though newspapers claim that they do not use the word ‘terrorist’ in the supposedly objective authorial voice, they freely use ‘terrorist suspects’. But the choice of this phrase subtly poisons the argument and contributes to a climate of fear.
What’s wrong with it? Well, it’s easy to see if you substitute the alleged crime. To call somebody not yet convicted of any offence a ‘rapist suspect’ or a ‘murderer suspect’ is already to assume the guilt of the person in question, by attaching to them the descriptive label reserved for those whose crimes have been proven in court. In the same way, to use the phrase ‘terrorist suspect’ commits a pre-emptive essentialism: the person is first defined as a terrorist – and remember, a terrorist is a person who is inherently evil – and only then is it grudgingly acknowledged that the basis for such a categorisation is as yet untested. Actually it need never be tested according to the normal standards of criminal prosecution: the whole point of designating someone a ‘terrorist suspect’ is to be able to lock them up without trial. You can be a terrorist without ever having committed an act of terrorism.
You might still think it desirable that anyone accused of a crime should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The widespread usage of the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’, on the contrary, goes a long way towards indicating guilt. It derives from, and feeds back into, an assumption that the lamentably old-fashioned ideal of presumed innocence is no longer appropriate to modern times. It is at one with the fine contemporary tradition of contempt for the courts evinced by Labour Home Secretaries in Britain. In April 2005, at the end of the notorious ‘ricin plot’ trial, Kamal Bourgass, who was already serving life in prison for the murder of a policeman, was convicted of conspiring to cause a public nuisance by planning to smear home-made ricin on doorknobs and cars in north London. His four co-defendants were unanimously acquitted, and a further prosecution collapsed. In response, Home Secretary Charles Clarke said: ‘We will obviously keep a very close eye on the eight men being freed today, and consider exactly what to do in the light of this decision.’56 Once you are a ‘terrorist suspect’, it seems, not even acquittal will help you. You are for ever guilty of having once been a suspect.
The assumption contained within the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ may also make it more comfortable to order torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial, or to export victims to regimes where it is known they will be tortured, a practice known in the US by the euphemism ‘rendition’ and publically condemned in April 2005 by Human Rights Watch (of which more in Chapter Seven). After all, if we already know they’re guilty, then we don’t feel so morally squeamish about applying any possible sanction. ‘Terrorist suspects’ can easily come to mean just ‘terrorists’, with the second word added as a verbal sop to bleeding-heart liberals but not taken seriously in a judicial process.
The phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ (or its singular) does not appear a single time in the archives of the Guardian and Observer for the whole of the year 1998. During 1999 and 2000, the construction appears nine and eleven times, respectively, in almost all cases involving alleged members of the IRA. Then something happens: the phrase gets hip. There follows an implacable crescendo: 79 uses in 2001, growing to 127 in 2004, and 94 up until the beginning of September 2005. But ‘terrorist suspects’ was not suddenly invented in 1999; it was already in use from the mid-1930s, as a British description of detained Jews in Palestine, or later as an Israeli description of detained Palestinians, or a British description of detained Irish persons, allegedly members of the IRA. The archives of the New York Times show the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ occurring on average five times a year in that newspaper since 1934. Having bobbed along in single figures for decades, however, it suddenly leaps to 54 uses in 2001, 45 in 2002, and 73 in 2003. Clearly the modern preponderance of the phrase has something to do with the growth of ‘war on terror’ rhetoric in recent years.
The phrase is now enshrined in British law; but it has not always been so. Consider the evolution of language in British anti-terrorism legislation. The government passed three Prevention of Terrorism Acts that were designed to deal with the IRA. The first, the Preventi
on of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act of 1974, does not even use the word ‘terrorist’, let alone ‘terrorist suspect’, but talks coolly (by modern standards) of ‘terrorism’ and ‘acts of terrorism’. Next came the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act of 1984 (you already see the comedy in this repeated use of the word ‘temporary’: governments are always loath to give up new powers, even if they were only meant to last a short while). Here, too, the talk is of ‘acts of terrorism’, or ‘terrorism’ alone, but still never of a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘terrorist suspect’.
The word ‘terrorist’ arrives with the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisons) Act of 1989,57 but only as an adjective, in combination with other words. So we read of ‘terrorist funds’, ‘terrorist activities’, and ‘terrorist investigations’. (Happily, the context makes it clear that the legislators mean funds belonging to terrorists, rather than money that throws bombs; and investigations of terrorism, rather than investigations which kill people.) There is still no example of ‘terrorist’ being used to denote a specific individual.
By 1994, though, things have changed. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of that year suddenly uses the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’, not in the main body of the text but almost as an afterthought in a technical section dealing with how the Act revises previous law. In Schedule 10, Consequential Amendments, the descriptive heading of paragraph 62 reads: ‘Samples: application to terrorist suspects’. The prejudicial concept has been smuggled into law by the back door.
The Terrorism Act 2000 was designed to replace the Prevention of Terrorism legislation. In December 1999, when the bill was before Parliament, the then Home Secretary Jack Straw explained its aims in the Guardian, and used our weasel phrase ‘terrorist suspects’: ‘The PTA allowed ministers – not judges – to decide whether a terrorist suspect should be detained by the police for longer than 48 hours.’58 As we have seen, in fact no version of the Prevention of Terrorism Act specifically used the phrase ‘terrorist suspect’; and the Terrorism Act 2000 itself uses the less loaded phrase ‘suspected terrorists’, almost as though the use of ‘terrorist suspects’ in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act had been an injudicious mistake. Yet a public servant is freely disseminating the phrase to the public. And the Act itself is already more prejudicial than those preceding it, according to barrister Helena Kennedy: ‘The presumption of guilt permeates the Terrorism Act 2000. It enshrines a reversal of the burden of proof, with accused persons having to show beyond reasonable doubt that they did not have items for terrorist purposes.’59
‘Terrorist suspect’ becomes cemented in the legal language in the Anti-terrorism, Crime & Security Act of 2001. Passed on 14 December 2001, in the wake of the attacks on America in September, this legislation is notable in that it immediately starts using more fizzy, populist language. Instead of ‘terrorist funds’, for example, it talks about ‘terrorist cash’. (Probably because ‘funds’ is a term of respectable financial institutions, while ‘cash’ conjures up black-market, underhand dealings.) For those under suspicion, the Act continues to use the traditional ‘suspected terrorists’ and ‘suspected international terrorists’, but finally gives in to the old temptation at paragraph 89, whose heading is ‘Fingerprinting of terrorist suspects’.
In America, meanwhile, the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ as a public legislative concept first appears in a Congress resolution ‘Regarding American victims of terrorism’60 that was referred to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in 1998. The ‘terrorist suspects’ in question are Palestinians, said by the Israeli authorities to have been involved in the killing of US citizens in Israel or the occupied territories; the resolution calls for them to be prosecuted in the US. This matter, and the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ itself, eventually pass into US public law in an Act passed on 29 November 1999 – just two weeks, coincidentally, before Jack Straw uses the phrase in his Guardian article on the other side of the Atlantic. The phrase appears in Section 805, ‘Report on Terrorist Activity in Which United States Citizens were Killed and Related Matters’, and commissions a State Department report on ‘The policy of the Department of State with respect to offering rewards for information on terrorist suspects’, a list of requests by the US ‘for the transfer of terrorist suspects from the Palestinian Authority and Israel’, and ‘A list of any terrorist suspects in these cases who are members of Palestinian police or security forces, the Palestine Liberation Organization, or any Palestinian governing body.’61
Thereafter the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ is liberally used in bills presented to the House and Senate, and after 11 September 2001, it is used in many official White House press releases and news briefings: for example, in a section-heading of a news briefing, ‘Gun purchases/terrorist suspects’;62 in a factsheet about how the FBI is ‘Monitoring Terrorist Suspects’;63 and in a triumphant report about ‘the successful apprehension of several dangerous terrorist suspects’64. Notice how the prejudicial nature of the phrase is particularly useful in the last case: the arrest of a suspect is only a victory in counter-terrorism if the suspect is in fact a terrorist. Don’t worry: these guys are not just ‘terrorist suspects’, they’re dangerous ‘terrorist suspects’. One would have thought that a person could only be described as ‘dangerous’ in this context once a court finds that he has committed, or was conspiring to commit, an act of terrorism. But the language launches a preemptive strike on the legal process. The case is effectively closed before it begins.
In contrast, the Council of Europe’s 2002 ‘Guidelines on human rights and the fight against terrorism’ noticeably refrains ever from using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe a person, real or hypothetical. Instead there are ‘acts of terrorism’, or ‘terrorist acts’, or ‘terrorist activities’. And instead of the egregious phrase ‘terrorist suspect’, the Council goes out of its way to use the phrase ‘a person suspected of terrorist activities’65. That might be a mouthful, but at least it displays a cool, forensic accuracy, quite the opposite of the public language in the Anglosphere.
So what have we found? That the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ begins to crop up in official legislative language in the US and UK between 1994 and 2001. Since 2001, it has gained ever-wider currency in the press. Does this prove that politicians cunningly engineered the phrase to serve their own illiberal purposes and were then helped to disseminate it by deliberately complicit journalists? No. But it’s clear that the introduction of ‘terrorist suspects’ in official discourse created an atmosphere in which it increasingly seemed to others that that was an appropriate phrase to use – or rather that, now it was there, they saw no reason not to use it: precious few people noticed its prejudicial quality. It is an example of what you might term unconscious collaboration.
It is not as though there are not more accurate descriptions available to politicians and reporters: to say ‘suspected terrorist’ or ‘terrorism suspect’, or even the headline-friendly ‘terror suspect’, does not carry the same prejudicial charge. But ‘terrorist suspect’ sounds sexier, more arresting; it gets the buzzword ‘terrorist’ into the mind first. It may look difficult to pronounce quickly, until you realise you don’t have to pronounce the ‘t’ in the middle but can elide it into a long hiss of disapproval: ‘terrorissssssuspect’. Furthermore it has, out of any of the alternatives, the most musically satisfying rhythm, as you trip through the troika of ‘terrorist’ and land with two satisfying hammer-blows on ‘suspect’. In a lighter mood, you could even sing it to the tune of ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
We can even sometimes see all the alternatives used within a single article. In a brilliant discussion of the US practice of ‘rendition’,66 the writer Jane Mayer uses ‘suspected terrorist(s)’ (twice), ‘terrorism suspects’ (three times), and ‘terror suspects’ (once), but she also uses the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ no fewer than six times, which is as many as the rest combined. And yet ‘terrorist suspects’ contains the attitude – we know they’re guilty, so it’s fi
ne to torture them – that this author deplores. Perhaps out of an understandable writer’s desire for elegant variation (she did not respond to a request for comment), Mayer thus, in a small but significant way, reinforces the justification for the phenomenon she is exposing. The article well illustrates the extent to which we have to be on our guard in adopting language that justifies a certain point of view. At other times, its use just becomes absurd, as when it was reported in the Guardian that Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot by British police, had ‘emerged from a block of flats police believed housed terrorist suspects’.67 Did the police believe the block housed ‘terrorists’, or did they know that it housed certain people whom they suspected of terrorism? Using the term ‘terrorist suspects’ in this way, vaguely ascribed to police ‘beliefs’, the paper’s own account of who was culpable or suspected of what was muddied beyond repair.
To resist the use of this kind of irresponsible language does not imply that one does not also recognise the real difficulties of the issue. Clearly, you cannot wait until someone kills hundreds of people before taking any action at all. But to accept the sly assumption of the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ is to assume the infallibility of police and intelligence services, in the face of notorious recent evidence that they can be very fallible indeed. ‘Terrorist suspect’ Jean Charles de Menezes, as we have seen, was presumed guilty and shot to death. Journalists have a responsibility to recognise prejudicial language for what it is. Any notion of fair and accurate reporting should require that the phrase ‘terrorist suspects’ be erased from the lexicon.