Devil's Dictionary of the Bush Era

Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 29, 2005.

For the last few years we have been ruled by lexicographers. Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words. In a sense, our post-9/11 moment began with two definitions: The Bush administration named our global enemy "terrorism" and called the acts that followed a "war," which was soon given the moniker "the global war on terror" (later reduced to the acronym GWOT, also known as World War IV), which was then given an instant future – being defined as a "generational struggle" that was still to come. All this, along with "war" itself, was simply announced rather than officially "declared."

Given that we were (by administration definition) at war, it should have been self-evident that those we captured in our "war" on terrorism would then be "prisoners of war," but no such luck for them, since their rights would in that case have been clearly defined in international treaties signed by the United States. So the Bush administration opened its Devil's Dictionary and came up with a new, tortured term for our new prisoners, "unlawful combatants," which really stood for: We can do anything we want to you in a place of our choosing. For that place, they then chose Guantanamo, an American base in Cuba (which they promptly defined as within "Cuban sovereignty" for the purposes of putting our detention camps beyond the purview of American courts or Congress, but within Bush administration sovereignty – the sole kind that counted with them – for the purposes of the Cubans).

In this way, we moved from a self-declared generational war against a method of making war to a world of torture beyond the reach of, or even sight of, the law in a place that (until the Supreme Court recently ruled otherwise) more or less didn't exist. All this was then supported by a world of pretzeled language constantly being reshaped in the White House Counsel's office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon so that reality would have no choice but to comply with the names given it.

The way gunmen once reached for their six-guns, so the various legal and other counselors of this administration reach for their dictionaries. The lawyer-authors of the various tortured memos about torture that came out of the White House Counsel's office and the Justice Department, for instance, expended much effort acting as if they were part of a panel for a new edition of some dictionary. Here are just a couple of examples along their tortuous path to redefining responsibility for the inflicting of pain:

The word 'profound' has a number of meanings, all of which convey a significant depth. Webster's New International Dictionary 1977 [2nd ed. 1935 defines profound as ...]

The word 'other' modifies 'procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses.' As an adjective, 'other' indicates that the term or phrase it modifies is the remainder of several things. See Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1598 (1986) (defining 'other' as 'the one that remains of two or more') Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 835 (1985) (defining 'other' as 'being the one (as of two or more) remaining or not included').

It seems they sat surrounded by the Webster's New International Dictionary (sometimes the 1935 edition, sometimes later ones), the American Heritage Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary, medical dictionaries, and who knows what else, as they decided just how much pain wasn't actually pain for the benefit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the president.

While they consulted piles of dictionaries and other reference materials to draw the pain out of a global torture regime, their true definitional focus was on removing all fetters, all checks and balances, from George W. Bush's power as president. Since we were "at war," they did so, in large part, by highlighting the role of our "war President" as commander-in-chief; and then redefining what his "wartime" powers would be. Their definitional goal: To place presidential power (in the form of the powers of the commander-in-chief to prosecute war) in a kind of constitutional Guantanamo; that is, beyond the "sovereignty" of any other powers in the American political system, thus removing from Bush and his subordinates any responsibility for acts he may have ordered committed. In the process, they redefined torture so narrowly that it became the definitional property of the torturer.

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