Cohen On Obama's Words

Another great piece by Roger Cohen at the NY Times:

Now we all know what “interrogation with enhanced techniques” means: an insect in a human cage.

Don’t say what you mean when you mean to do the unspeakable. That’s an old rule. It was perfected in the 20th century from Moscow to Buenos Aires.

Opacity is the refuge of the faceless tormentor. The constitutions of totalitarian states are always unreadable, impenetrable — and very long. In a thicket of words lies plausible deniability when the time for horror’s accounting arrives. That hour always comes around.

I keep re-reading some of the sentences in the memos from the dark side. Like a labyrinth, they lead back in on themselves: “You have, however, informed us that you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.”

The “technique” has a “culmination” that is not necessarily an “ending”; and on round again, several hundred times.

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

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