This is why Billmon's the best.

A spokesman for the Senate Armed Services chairman says draft legislation is headed to Capitol Hill with "new language," for a proposal that would allow the CIA to continue alternative interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

CNN

Senate aide: White House changingits CIA interrogation bill

September 19, 2006

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language

1946

...

While civilized societies uphold justice, mercy, and the value of life, the terrorists hold to an ideology that feeds on the pain of others and glorifies murder and suicide. Though they plot and plan and operate by stealth, the terrorists make no secret of the beliefs they hold. They seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child would live in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology.

Dick Cheney

Speech to the National Automobile Dealers Association

September 19, 2006

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy . . . And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language

1946

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