Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  Iraqi shock and awe were supposed to be the results of the massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad that opened the 2003 war; in fact the real psychological campaign was represented by the repeated public announcements of ‘shock and awe’ that preceded the actual dropping of bombs, attempting to provoke mass desertion among the Iraqi military. Inasmuch as its targets were at the time not fighting, and as it hoped to provoke a political decision through instilling fear, ‘shock and awe’ was an act of terrorism itself.

  Moreover, the phrase, describing as existing in reality what it only hoped to provoke, worked beautifully in propagandistic terms. Nearly two years later, historian John Lewis Gaddis was able to refer complacently to ‘The shock and awe that accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq’,97 thus translating a PR description into an established historical fact. Nevertheless, the targets of ‘shock and awe’ did not in fact appear to be much deterred. As Fred Halliday puts it: ‘Shock and Awe. US military term, much heard in 2001–3, for the use of overwhelming military force against an enemy, in this case Iraq. Rather underestimated compliance of target population.’98 However, there was one set of people for whom ‘shock and awe’ might have been quite an accurate description of their response: that is, the global television audience who were able to watch, on CNN and the BBC, live pictures in ghostly green nightvision of bombs exploding in Baghdad. Perhaps indeed it was television spectators who were the primary intended targets of ‘shock and awe’ all along, in which case it might be accounted rather a success.

  The phrase ‘war on terror’ itself had a similar use, too: it energised the imagination. It sounded awesome, evoking a picture of an apocalyptic fight of good against evil. ‘Terror’ was reified as an impacable, chthonic force infecting the globe. This theological application was explicitly illustrated when George W. Bush announced: ‘Our war is against evil.’99

  In many ways, then, ‘war on terror’ obeys faithfully the principles set out in another eighteenth-century satirical pamphlet. Peri Bathous, or Martinus Scriblerus his Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry, was published in 1727 and is attributed to John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope. To write the worst possible verse, they advised: ‘The Expression is adequate, when it is proportionably low to the Profundity of the Thought. It must not be always Grammatical, lest it appear pedantic and ungentlemanly; nor too clear, for fear it become vulgar; for Obscurity bestows a Cast of the Wonderful, and throws an oracular Dignity upon a Piece which hath no meaning.’100

  Mark well: not too clear. Obediently, ‘war on terror’, this flexibly potent phrase, also enabled a fog of constructive ambiguity to arise around the status of the enemy. The war on terror was a war when the US wanted it to be and something else when it didn’t – for example when it wished to recruit as allies countries that had renounced war. But who was it fighting?

  Just as they have sought to muddy the use of the term ‘civilian’ for their targets, those called terrorists have historically always seen themselves as soldiers fighting a war, as can be seen, for instance, in the name of the Irish Republican Army, or in the radical Islamist interpretation of the concept of jihad as holy war. To acknowledge one’s opponents as soldiers, however – even as ‘guerrillas’, or irregular soldiers, from the Spanish diminutive of guerra, war – is already to accord them a kind of legitimacy, so the usual response of governments is to refuse to use that terminology. Such an argument was explicitly joined in South Africa in the 1970s, with one newspaper commentator protesting: ‘The Minister cannot expect journalists to do violence to the English language […] by describing guerrilla warfare as terrorism at all times and in all circumstances.’101 For the same reasons, the French never used the word ‘war’ for their actions in Algeria between 1954 and 1962.102 Similarly, Margaret Thatcher resisted the notion that her government was engaged in a ‘war’ against the IRA, and ‘insisted that Britain was fighting terrorists’.103 The IRA appeared to have the last word when they announced in July 2005 that the ‘war’ was over.

  It might seem trickier, though, to do this once you have actually announced a ‘war on terror’. Surely if a war is being fought, both sides consist of soldiers? On the one hand this makes things easier: for during a war you do not try to arrest the enemy, but merely shoot him. ‘It is not a metaphorical war,’ insisted Air Force Brigadier General Thomas Hemingway.104 But it would surely be annoying to have to treat captured terrorists, or ‘terrorist suspects’, according to their rights of protection under the Geneva Convention. And so for these purposes, the war on terror was not really a war after all but a ‘conflict’. On 7 February 2002, George W. Bush signed the following statement: ‘I … determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.’105 No mention there of a ‘war’. The ‘war on terror’ is only for public consumption. In careful legal terms, the use of ‘war’ would imply that the provisions of Geneva did in fact apply. And thus it’s only a ‘conflict’.

  ‘Asymmetric warfare’ is the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at: on the one side you have battalions of American infantry, marines, tanks, and aircraft; and on the other you have terrorists, or guerrillas, or militants, or insurgents. But the more revealing asymmetry lies in the giving of names in the ‘war on terror’. We are soldiers; you are terrorists. Asymmetric warfare means: we are fighting a war; but you are not. And so when we capture you, do not expect to be a prisoner of war. You will be a terrorist suspect, an illegal combatant, a ghost detainee. And so the deliberate blurring of categories in the phrase ‘war on terror’ led straight to Abu Ghraib.

  7

  Abuse

  Repetitive adminstration

  In December 2002, two prisoners at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan, died after trauma to their legs of such severity that the coroners compared it to the results of being run over by a bus. The subsequent official investigation was nothing if not creative. The death of one was explained in this way:

  ‘No one blow could be determined to have caused the death,’ the former senior staff lawyer at Bagram, Col. David L. Hayden, said he had been told by the Army’s lead investigator. ‘It was reasonable to conclude at the time that repetitive administration of legitimate force resulted in all the injuries we saw.’1

  The logic of this is startling. You may compare it in some ways to the Chinese method of execution, used until 1905, known as ‘death by a thousand cuts’. Since no one cut can be determined to cause death, no one is responsible for the killing. Similar is the principle behind the firing squad: everyone fires at the same time and one soldier has a blank, so no one soldier can be sure that he killed his comrade. But at least in these two cases the intention is avowedly to cause death. To use the argument as an excuse for ‘accidental’ extrajudicial killing is different. It is perhaps more like a sophistic application of Zeno’s paradox of motion. Since at every place in the flight of an arrow it can be considered at rest, an infinite number of such points of rest cannot possibly add up to travel, so the arrow does not actually move and can never reach its target. Similarly, no number of ‘legitimate’ things can ever add up to something that is illegitimate. It’s just one of those unfortunate things.

  But this is deliberate linguistic misdirection. The insertion of the word ‘legitimate’ before ‘force’ aims exactly to pre-empt the question of legitimacy. Even if one allows that some force might be legitimate, one is dissuaded from wondering whether a repetitive sequence of legitimate blows can be illegitimate. That principle is common in other areas of law: repetitively playing your music too loud can add up to a disturbance of the peace. ‘Legitimate’ force also implies that the victim had been found guilty of a crime deserving of violent punishment; but the dead prisoners had never had a trial.

  The argument is weak on a more physical level, too. If I tap you lightly on the head a hundred times, you may become very annoyed, but this will not add up to crushing your sk
ull. Equally, repeated light blows to the thighs will not add up to crushing them as though you had been run over by a bus. The ‘legitimate force’ in these blows must in truth be fierce. And so the whole defence does nothing but beg the question of legitimacy itself.

  In fact the blows to the legs were not mild slaps but ‘peroneal strikes’, a deliberately disabling strike to the side of the leg, just above the knee, which targets the peroneal nerve. One of the former police officers who trained the guards in this technique said that it would ‘tear up’ a prisoner’s legs if used repeatedly. A military policeman at the base, Specialist Jones, testified as to how entertaining it was to brutalise a detainee in this way and hear him cry out to his god: ‘It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out “Allah,” he said. ‘It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.’

  Inflicting pain for its comic value might not be many people’s idea of ‘legitimate force’. By the time the man who so amused the military police died, most interrogators at the base had concluded that he was an innocent taxi driver.

  The word ‘administration’, meanwhile, is another example of the bureaucratisation of the language of violence. Medicine is administered; civil government is administration. Punishment is administered only after due process. To call the beating of an unconvicted prisoner the ‘administration’ of force is already to approve of it, by describing it in the language of official sanction. The very phrase ‘repetitive administration’ is designed to coat the mind in grey cotton-wool, to conjure vistas of endless similar days in fluorescent-lit offices, and thus to mask the reality of brutal violence inflicted for sadistic enjoyment. In the end, the best translation of Colonel Hayden’s words is: ‘Yes, we beat these men to death, but we have determined that we had the right to do so.’

  Abuse; or, the torture word

  This case was reported in the New York Times under the heading of ‘Detainee Abuse’. ‘Abuse’ is the usual word for the physical and psychological violence inflicted upon prisoners captured in the ‘war on terror’ and held at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere. It is an administrative euphemism that has been widely adopted by a media cravenly hedging its bets. Indeed, ‘abuse’ is a productively vague term. As a noun, ‘abuse’ implies a lamentable exception to normal rules, which, as we shall see shortly, is used to displace blame. As a verb, to ‘abuse’ an inanimate object is ‘to use improperly, to misuse’.2 The idea of ‘abusing’ a person, then, is a distasteful metaphor, implying as it does that human beings are tools with more or less correct uses, rather than, as Immanuel Kant argued, being ends in themselves. It is nonetheless understood in specific constructions such as ‘child abuse’ that the mistreatment involved is of a very serious nature. On the other hand, simply to ‘abuse’ a person can mean calling him an idiot. Or, apparently, torturing him to death.

  It is rather helpful to have recourse to such a term, because it does not necessarily imply criminality; rather, it names a wide spectrum of activity, some of which is criminal (beating) and some of which isn’t (name-calling). When asked a question about ‘torture’ in the wake of the public dissemination of the Abu Ghraib photos, Donald Rumsfeld responded thus:

  I think that – I’m not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. Just a minute. […] I don’t know if the – it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there’s been a conviction for torture. And therefore I’m not going to address the torture word.3

  Rumsfeld claims that ‘abuse’ is ‘technically’ different from torture; however, there is no ‘technical’ definition of ‘abuse’ in general at all: that is precisely why the term was chosen, because in its generosity of scope it obscures the particulars of violent acts. Rumsfeld feels obliged to remind his audience that he is not a lawyer, as though the Secretary of Defense must not be expected to have any understanding of international law, whether it relates to torture or anything else. And finally, he refuses to ‘address the torture word’. Not the matter of torture, not the physical facts of torture; just the ‘word’ itself. The very word makes him squeamish: in slamming the dictionary shut on it, he acknowledges its power.

  A series of US government memoranda in 2002 showed no such unwillingness to ‘address the torture word’; indeed they addressed it so enthusiastically that they have become known as the ‘Torture Memos’. Among the most notorious passages from these documents is the following, from Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee:

  Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.4

  This is a much more restrictive definition than any previous concept of ‘torture’ delineated in US or international law. The UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), which entered into force in 1987, defines torture thus:

  [T]he term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

  So the CAT’s ‘severe pain or suffering’ has been creatively glossed by Bybee as ‘the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death’, a far narrower description. How to get round this obvious incompatibility? The trick is to argue that the United States is not in fact strictly bound by the Convention’s terms. On the same day that Bybee redefined ‘the torture word’, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo wrote a memo helpfully explaining that the US had entered a ‘reservation’ with its ratification of the Convention to the effect that it would be bound only by its own definition of torture and not the one set out in the Convention itself. According to international lawyer Philippe Sands, however, this was not actually true: ‘Yoo has misunderstood what the US did in ratifying the Convention. It did not enter a “reservation” redefining torture and setting the bar at a higher level; it entered an “understanding”. This is an entirely different thing. Whilst a reservation can change the international legal obligation, an “understanding” cannot.’5 Throughout his memo, Yoo incontinently switches between the terms ‘reservation’ and ‘understanding’, climaxing with this marvellous logical circle: ‘under international law we consider it [the ‘understanding’] to be a reservation if it indeed modifies the Torture Convention standard.’6 That is like saying we consider a wildebeest to be a fish, if it indeed can breathe underwater.

  What was the effect of changing the definition of torture? According to Bybee, the result was that ‘there is a significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment fail to rise to the level of torture’. What kind of work is the phrase ‘significant range’ doing here? If it is a significant range, rather than just a range, presumably the author wants to draw attention to it, and to its rich possibilities for action. He is perhaps offering it as a menu. Go ahead and pick, this sentence says: we might get embroiled in some annoying arguments about ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’, but you can be sure these acts do not constitute torture, since I have just redefined torture explicitly so as to exclude them. Let’s see what he has in mind. Bybee refers to a case where a victim was made to kneel, and then kicked in the stomach with military boots. ‘We would disagree,’ he writes coolly, that this ‘rose to the level of “severe pain or su
ffering”.’7 Note the repetition of the image of violent acts failing to ‘rise to the level’ of torture, as though torture were a pinnacle of human endeavour, rather than its nadir. The clear implication is that US interrogators have a legal green light to kick prisoners in the stomach.

  After this flurry of sophistry over the word ‘torture’, US military personnel entered a series of official requests for approval of certain interrogation techniques. In an October 2002 memo from Guantánamo’s Lt. Col. Jerald Phifer entitled ‘Request for Approval of Counter-Resistance Strategies’, one technique for which authorisation was sought was: ‘The use of stress positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours.’8 In agreeing to this, Donald Rumsfeld scrawled the following at the bottom of the memo: ‘However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?’9 This is a beautiful illustration of plausible deniability. The language of ‘stress positions (like standing)’ is innocuous, and it is easy to imagine an incurious Secretary of Defense idly picturing a prisoner remaining on his feet but able to wander around, talk on the telephone, drink coffee, and so on. The reality of ‘stress positions’ is not quite like that, as Adam Hochschild explains: