Happy New Year. I know it has been a while since the last post, but with all the holidays and other tasks, I never got around to it. Last time—if you haven’t read the previous post, scroll down or use the archive links at the side to check it out first—I was discussing language and terminology used in this war in Iraq in comparison with apartheid South Africa. I left off with a quote by William Blum about the “word games” the government plays in such war situations to stretch the truth and garner support. I’ll continue this discussion using other examples.
The US government plays even more word games with its legislation on the treatment of terrorist suspects. For example, a New York Times editorial in response to the Senate passing the Detainee Interrogation Bill September 28, 2006 details the bill’s problems, which include a vague definition of “enemy combatant” that could apply widely to almost anyone, and a restricted definition of coercion as well as of torture, which excludes many forms of sexual assault. Debate over what constitutes torture has especially become an issue with the growing controversy over waterboarding, along with other physically severe CIA interrogation methods euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” When the US went before the UN Committee Against Torture on May 5, 2006, experts even requested that the US clarify its classification of torture and be willing to abide by international standards instead of setting its own. More recently, in an Associated Press article about Bush’s defense of interrogation policies and denial of torture allegations, White House press secretary Dana Perino declined to define what counted as torture in interrogations, commenting, "I just fundamentally disagree that that would be a good thing for national security," she said. "I think the American people recognize that there are needs that the federal government has to keep certain information private…”
This appeal to secrecy was also a hallmark of the apartheid regime’s crimes against humanity. According to Gobodo-Madikizela’s book that I discussed in the prior post, it “formed the very basis on which the covert operations program was established. Top-level government officials used the need to keep the program secret to justify their use of secret language. But in reality what kept the program secret…was the relative lack of overt publicity about it.” Like the South Africans, the US has kept much of its activities against terror suspects a mystery as Perino’s comment indicates. At the same meeting with the UN Committee Against Torture mentioned above, the lead US delegate John Bellinger could not comment on the intelligence information that the Committee questioned, yet the committee was aware of new hidden detention sites. Even within days of 9/11, the FBI undertook the highly secretive PENTTBOM operation, abducting people from their own homes on immigration and terrorist suspicions. In an October 2006 article about it, Lee Gelernt with the American Civil Liberties Union remarked that “after 9/11, everyone was caught off guard. There was so much secrecy surrounding the government’s policies that it took a number of months before the public and civil-liberties groups began unraveling what the government was doing.” And even years later the U.S. government still had not made information public on these detainees’ identities or what was done to them. We also still know few details of even the more famous detention sites, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, again because of supposed security needs. Though the Taguba Report on the Abu Ghraib offenses is publicly available, many parts of the document are still withheld, like the detainee, witness, and suspect statements.
In my opinion, it is because of the discrepancies between the actual motives of the war and the publicly projected ones mentioned in the last post, namely freedom and fighting terrorism, that we see abstractness in references to the Iraq war operations—like the abstract references to “the enemy”. Time and time again, President Bush and his cabinet as well as the media use the term “enemy” when discussing the war on terror and Iraq. Far too many instances of this are available to pick examples from, but even looking at sources I’ve already referred to before, we can see it numerous times. In Bush’s speech aboard the USS Lincoln to announce the end of combat in Iraq, he asserts, “…we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike.” And in the 60 Minutes story on Haditha, the narrator says in reference to the murder of six Marines prior to the incident: “the enemy put it on the Internet” and later: “they [Wuterich and his men] couldn’t see the enemy, but it was clear the enemy was watching them.” Not only does the use of the term “enemy” allow the US government to avoid specifying against whom a seemingly aimless war in Iraq—or at least a war with an ever-changing aim—is being fought so that they do not have to confront the fact that the war is not what they say it is, it also becomes a catch word that turns the human targets into an inhuman force, facilitating the use of violence against them. Its negative connotations are used to evoke sentiments of fear and anger that enable the maintenance of public support against the “bad guys”. Recent coverage on former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “snowflake” memos reveals precisely such a desire to sway public opinion on the war and “keep elevating the threat” through language, such as by using “bumper sticker statements” and even renaming the war on terrorism to consider it fighting a “worldwide insurgency” in order to see what effects the change would have on the public. When running for re-election, President Bush also manipulatively used the term “enemy” throughout one of the 2004 presidential debates. For instance, in response to a question about Iraq and whether he’d consider future preemptive action, he responded that he never planned to use military force “but the enemy attacked us.” In other words, he suggested that the “enemy” who committed the 9/11 attacks was the same “enemy” that necessitated invading Iraq. Senator Kerry luckily made a point to call him out on confusing Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden.
Certainly, the term “enemy” is frequently used by militaries and governments in wars, yet the failure to acknowledge what is behind that word but to use it almost exclusively suggests some persuasive motive, or at least some sense of secrecy or uncertainty. When I ask myself who the “enemy” is in this war, I am hard-pressed to find answers. There is no Iraqi government that has declared war on the US or any official Iraqi military force or opponent that we are fighting. So is it the Iraqi people? It can’t be; we’re fighting for them. Some might answer the insurgents, but that response is very complicated when you examine who they are, whether they even existed before the war, whether they are acting offensively or defensively, whether they have a right to resist occupation—especially considering that this war was not mutually agreed upon but was self-proclaimed on a country that did not ever attack the US. Even the very fact that the term “enemy” is mistakenly used in cases that resulted in civilian deaths, such as in Haditha, raises suspicions.
In other past so-called wars mentioned previously, a similar labeling of “enemy” was also common practice to justify violence. Anti-apartheid blacks were “justifiably” subjected to state-sponsored terror in that “war” because they were “enemies of the state” and Colonel Meinertzhagen also refers to “the enemy” in his operations in colonial Kenya. I guess not much has changed.
Thus, these last two posts have shown that, though apartheid fortunately ended in 1994, the type of language and tactics used to justify the system continue to live on as the US justifies the Iraq war. We could go on and on with examples of word choice in the war in Iraq, such as the vague references to the “mission” of military operations, discussions of trying to achieve “victory” or “succeeding” in the war—whatever that means since no one seems to ever explain when that would be or what exactly “success” entails—and the list goes on, but I think after these two posts, you get the picture. However, there is one specific group that has a term of its very own which warrants a separate discussion: the insurgency. In an upcoming post, I’ll go more in depth with that to try to understand what’s behind this popular word “insurgency”.
Sources:
-Jennifer Loven “Bush Defends US Interrogation Methods” Yahoo! News, Sunday, October 7 2007, http://beta.malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ap/20071005/twl-bush-terrorism-1be00ca.html
-Tom Wright, “U.S. delegation faces UN panel: Committee Against Torture listens skeptically to explanations” International Herald Tribune May 6, 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/05/news/geneva.php?page=1
-Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African woman confronts the legacy of apartheid (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company 2003), 62, 65-66
-“The Killings in Haditha” CBS News 60 Minutes September 2, 2007 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/15/60minutes/printable2574973.shtml
-Colonel R. Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary: 1902-1906 (London, Oliver and Boyd Ltd. 1957), 50
-“Full Text: Bush Speech Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln” Washington Post, May 1, 2003 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2627-2003May1
-Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps: Detainee Has Not Been Charged, Not Seen As A Threat, But Is Behind Bars,” MSN News Oct 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.com/id/15264274/page/2/
-Robin Wright, “From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld…:In Sometimes Brusque ‘Snowflakes,’ He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy,” Washington Post, Nov 1 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103103095_pf.html
-Commission on Presidential Debates, “Debate Transcript September 30, 2004: The First Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate,” http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a_p.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment