Euphemisms

Many critiques about the American military manipulation of language during that war have used George Orwell's 1945 essay on "Politics and the English Language" as a starting point for their analyses. In that, Orwell wrote:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. 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.

Orwell was accurate in describing the use of euphemisms by his contemporary warmakers (in the 1940s) , but it would be inaccurate to restrict this to a modern practice (the "decay of language" bit), or to one side ("good guys/bad guys"), or to make an absolute condemnation of euphemisms.

Familiarity / unfamiliarity is the crucial issue. Euphemisms per se are not bad; it's whether the audience understands the message being sent. Many euphemisms are familiar and common conventions within a language community. For example, our standard euphemisms for death and dying (passed away, eternal reward) and bodily functions (going to the bathroom, the washroom) are well understood within our society.

It's only when the meaning is obscured that euphemisms cause problems. When the Pentagon uses euphemisms, technical jargon such as "low yield, clean thermonuclear device," most people do not get an accurate mental picture of the reality because the words sound rather pleasant: it's low yield, clean, and only a device. By words, the military has downplayed the reality that these bombs are more powerful, more devastating, more catastrophic than any weapon ever used before in human history.

In the 1990s, a new cluster of euphemisms appeared as the US government began to become "more efficient" and to privitize and to outsource its military activities to PMFs (private military firms). Now, skilled hired men with guns -- who used to be called mercenaries and "soldiers of fortune" -- are called "security contractors." Such euphemisms not only obscure the reality of what they are doing, but also obscure the whole funding, budgeting, accountability, and ethics of a military in a democratic society.

"Collateral damage" was the euphemism-of-choice starting with the Vietnam war in the 1970s to describe the accidental killing of civilians. "Civilian contractors" may be the euphemism-of-choice of the Iraq war and the future.

For most Americans in early 2004, the term "civilian contractors" suggested images of hard-hat guys working on construction sites in the Iraq Reconstruction program helping the local people to rebuild a war-torn nation.

But, after 4 American civilian contractors were killed in Fallouja, their bodies descecrated, and the subsequent reprisal, intense fighting and stalemate, the implications of this euphemism for mercenaries started to emerge publically, issues including:

Estimated number: 15,000-20,000 such mercenaries (mostly ex-Marines, Special Forces) currently in Iraq (more, elsewhere*)

Concealment of Pentagon budgets -- a common way to "cuts costs" and "reduce defense spending"is to hide things in other budgets.

War profiteering by the executives and stockholders of a few well-connected corporations (e.g. Halliburton, CACI International Inc., Titan Corp., Aegis)

Troop morale and issues of fairness -- mercenaries in the combat zone get 5 times the pay than do our military personnel there (many of whom, as reservists, have lost their civilian jobs)

Lack of control and responsibility -- when the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was revealed, the American people also became aware that such mercenaries (the interrogators and "translators") were "beyond the law" -- unable to be prosecuted under any American laws.

Mercenaries

"In the shock of the Iraqi abuse scandal — amid horrific images of prisoner brutality, the inquiries into who did what and who told them to — one unsettling detail went largely unnoticed. But only temporarily. Of the 37 interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison, 27 did not belong to the U.S. military but to a Virginia private contractor called CACI International. Twenty-two linguists who assisted them were employed by California-based Titan International." -- The Privitization of Abu Ghraib

See: P.W. Singer, "Above Law, Above Decency" | For more: P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell,2004)

See also, "Many Nations Employ Torture out of sight" -- "Two thirds of the world practices torture, said [Professor Lisa Hajjar], but no one admits it. And if anyone finds out, the state-perpetrator often engages in 'implicatory denial.' That is, a top official blames an aberrant agent for the action, while stating that whatever the abuser did flies in the face of what the nation sees as just."Pelton writes about Timothy Spicer, controversial and notorious British mercenary whose 2 year old company, Aegis, received a lucratuve US contract to provide 600 armed men as security guards in Iraq, and "to coordinate the operations of 60 other private military companies already working in Iraq and their 20,000 men, including handling security at prisons and oil fields. It's a no-risk, cost-plus arrangement that could earn the company up to $293 million."

* San Diego, California (AP - May 12, 2004) "The 7th Fleet's flagship, U.S.S. Coronado, sailed into Yokosuka, Japan with a mostly civilan crew in an experiment officials say could have broad implications for the way the Navy staffs its ships around the world.... Although the top command, weapons and other key positions are reserved for military personnel, civilians outnumber military sailors on the Coronado 153 to 117.... Unlike their enlisted counterparts, civilians can be let go as soon as they are no longer needed. They are paid about twice as much as people in uniform, but they don't get many of the military's benefits." This report notes, in addition, the Military Sealift Command has over 100 civilian merchant marine ships"positioned offshore of trouble spots around the world to supply militaty operations."

In the shock of the Iraqi abuse scandal — amid horrific images of prisoner brutality, the inquiries into who did what and who told them to — one unsettling detail went largely unnoticed
.
But only temporarily.

Of the 37 interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison, 27 did not belong to the U.S. military but to a Virginia private contractor called CACI International. Twenty-two linguists who assisted them were employed by California-based Titan International.

Two of these workers were cited in Maj.-Gen. Anthony Taguba's damning report on the "sadistic, blatant and wanton" treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib 1A cellblock.

Unlike the seven reservist guards facing criminal trials and military intelligence officers under investigation, interrogator Steven Stefanowicz and translator John Israel face no accountability, let alone punishment. Being civilians, they are not subject to military law nor to the Geneva Convention.

Local prosecution could have been an option — if Iraq had a functioning judiciary, which it doesn't — but last year, U.S. administrator Paul Bremer issued an order protecting contractors from precisely that.

An extraterratoriality law that would have made civilian contractees subject to U.S. domestic law sits stalled on Attorney-General John Ashcroft's desk.

The two men likely will be fired, though neither CACI nor Titan has so far said so. That's all that happened in 1999 in Bosnia after several employees of another firm, DynCorp, were accused of statutory rape and running a child-prostitution ring.

The only court cases involved the two whistleblowers
.
"To give the civilians in Iraq a legal free pass is unconscionable," says Peter W. Singer, author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise Of The Privatized Military Industry, a scathing examination of the Pentagon's spiralling reliance on outsourcing.Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution, briefed 40 members of Congress last week, after they'd viewed the photographic evidence of abuse. He says they wanted to know why civilians were even involved in the questioning of detainees.

"Using them for interrogation is pushing the envelope about as far as it's possible to go. It should nor have happened."

It likely wasn't planned, analysts say.

With an arrest-first, question-later policy in Iraq and the conflict lasting longer than the White House envisioned, the demand for interrogators simply outstripped the supply, both of military and Central Intelligence Agency specialists.

The defence department was caught on the hop, says Singer, "because it never prepared a worst-case scenario. That's the mode in this administration, and disagreement isn't the proper face of loyalty."

Washington has made no secret of the fact that private military firms (PMFs) have been active in Iraq since the start of the war. Their numbers shot up after its official end a year ago, when the job of reconstruction began.

PMFs, the largest of which is Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, are used for everything short of front-line combat.

They're feeding the troops, guarding key sites, managing logistics and providing security for the Coalition Provisional Authority, even for Bremer.

(He's guarded by Blackwater Security, four of whose employees were murdered in March, bringing to 17 the number of contractees killed in Iraq.)

Training of both the Iraqi army and police force are being conducted by private firms with contracts worth tens of millions of dollars.
Outsourcing has been on the rise since the Cold War's end led to the downsizing of the world's huge standing armies: In 1991, the U.S. military numbered 2 million; today, it's 1.4 million. Thousands of newly unemployed special forces and intelligence officers signed up with the burgeoning private security industry and saw their income jump from paltry military pay to upwards of $1,500 a day.

A decade ago, the industry was mainly used by multinational corporations and oil companies operating in high-risk regions. Since 9/11 and the war on terror, however, its biggest client is the Pentagon.

Today, there are hundreds of for-profit companies, mainly American, some British, with about 20,000 personnel in Iraq, doing traditional military work, including intelligence. That makes PMFs the largest contingent after the U.S. military, far outnumbering the British.

The companies stand to reap an estimated 30 per cent of the $87 billion (U.S.) appropriated by Congress for Iraq's "regeneration." No one is sure of the amount because Congress doesn't have to be notified on contracts worth less than $50 million.

But Congress, much less the American public, also wasn't notified that privatization had moved beyond support roles.
Analysts say outsourcing crept up on the Pentagon. But it was the under-deployment of troops — only 130,000 were sent, against the military's recommended 250,000 — that led to the unprecedented amount being used in Iraq.

"Outsourcing just grew and grew and no line was drawn at core functions," says Lawrence Korb, an assistant defence secretary in the Reagan administration who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. "But interrogation crosses over into government's role."Once the furor over Abu Ghraib subsides, Korb says, a hard look will be taken at the role of contractors, regardless of who wins the election in November. If they are going to be used, then laws must be written to govern their activities.

"But should they be doing interrogations?" he asks. "Are these people qualified?"

Not according to Torin Nelson, a former military intelligence officer who served in Bosnia and Guantanamo before resigning to go private with CACI. He was hired after a 35-minute phone call, he says, and was one of the 27 civilian interrogators at Abu Ghraib. He supplied evidence for Taguba's report.

In an interview with the Guardian this month, Nelson said the competence of the private contractees was "kind of hit or miss." As the demand rose, the quality of CACI's interrogators dropped sharply, he said, with "cooks and truck drivers" being hired because the company was "under so much pressure to fill slots quickly."

But Nelson also said he was alarmed by the message from military commanders at Abu Ghraib to get intelligence from the detainees — at any cost.

"`Anything goes' to me as an interrogator puts up a red flag," he said, "but with others, it may be a green light."

He quit in disgust in February but is now working for another PMF elsewhere in the world.

Analysts say the expansion of for-hire contractors into areas beyond basic military support could lower the social and psychological bar for resorting to war.

If young troops don't have to be sacrificed in far-flung combat zones, it could be easier for generals and their political masters to make the decision to use force.

And the industry won't object because conflicts equal profits.

Going private also allows the Pentagon to avoid scrutiny of its actions, critics say. It has been alleged, for instance, that put private soldiers were sent to Colombia to boost the number of regular U.S. troops authorized by Congress.

The catch, say analysts, is that when military and private meet up — when low-paid loyalty to country has to work with high-paid loyalty to company — resentments can breed.

Bill Hartung, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, says regular troops in Iraq resent the two civilians in the abuse scandal getting off without reprisal, while the reservists face courts martial.

And they were furious last winter when Vinnell, a subsidiary of defence giant Northrop Grumman, so badly botched the job of training the new Iraqi military that the Jordanian army had to be rushed in to finish the job.

The military also had qualms when DynCorp, the firm involved in the prostitution scandal in Bosnia, was brought in to train the Iraqi police force.

It's already in Afghanistan, providing security for President Hamid Karzai.

"Their guys are seen as too swaggery, waving their guns around, full of Texas testosterone," says Hartung.Those guys wouldn't be there if the administration hadn't underestimated the amount of troops needed for the war and the bloody aftermath, he says, "but ramping up the numbers would have been an unacceptable admission of error.

"There will be some sort of reckoning after this. Contractors have to be regulated, yes, but they also have to be kept out of intelligence and out of the front lines — not that there are well-defined front lines in this kind of war."

During Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's lightning visit to Iraq last week, it was announced that Abu Ghraib would be renamed Camp Redemption.

Meanwhile, the events, participants and chain of command, or absence thereof, are now under minute scrutiny by the Pentagon, an angry Senate armed forces committee and an outraged public.

Before the inquiries are over, the spotlight is certain to turn to the unapproved use of civilians for interrogations.

Then, says Wesley Wark, an intelligence specialist at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, "a huge tidal wave will sweep over the issue and the real drive will come from the higher ranks at the Pentagon who've been divided under Rumsfeld.

"After Abu Ghraib, we'll see a slowing-down of the private military industry. At least that's my optimistic hope."
Col. Foster Payne, now in charge of interrogation at "Camp Redemption" — where some 3,000 Iraqis remain in detention — said three CACI interrogators were are still working there. He made no apologies.

"They're professionals in their own right. They have wide experience in the field and contribute to the team."

But then he added: "We're questioning whether we need to use contractors."
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Copyright 2004 Toronto Star

In May 2005, the Pentagon announced that the current 106 US bases in Iraq will be consolidated into 4 huge bases: "The new, sturdier buildings will give the bases a more permanent character, the officers acknowledged. But they said the consolidation plan was not meant to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq.... Each base is being designed to hold a brigade-size combat team plus aviation units and other support personnel. Initially referred to in planning documents as "enduring bases," the term was changed in February to "contingency operating bases." (Initial report: May 22, 2005: US to consolidate forces into four huge bases )

CLCs - (Called CLCs, or Volunteers, by our side, they are likely to be called collaborators or traitors by the other side.)
Female Suicide Bomber Attacks Iraqi Volunteers
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | December 8, 2007

BAGHDAD -- A female bomber blew herself up Friday in front of a building used by former Sunni Arab insurgents now allied with U.S. forces, one of three attacks that killed at least 24 people in Diyala province during the day.

It was the latest in a string of bombings that have targeted groups dubbed "concerned local citizens," or CLCs, which aid U.S. efforts to combat the insurgency.

The military has been working with about 60,000 volunteers, including some former insurgents, to help police their areas in central and northern Iraq. They are credited with helping to drive Sunni militants from Anbar province and parts of Baghdad, where attacks have declined since about 28,500 additional U.S. forces arrived in the country this year. But violence has flared in regions north of the capital, where many of the militants are believed to have fled.

Women rarely carry out suicide missions in Iraq, but the attack Friday was the second such bombing in Diyala in less than two weeks. On Nov. 27, a woman detonated her explosives near a U.S. patrol, wounding seven troops and five Iraqi civilians near the provincial capital, Baqubah.

Friday's female bomber struck about 9.30 a.m. on a busy street in Muqdadiya, a volatile ethnically and religiously mixed city about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. Police said 16 people were killed and 27 injured, but the U.S. military put the figure at 12 dead and 17 wounded.

The woman targeted a safe house used by members of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an insurgent group that once fought alongside the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq under the banner of Islamic State of Iraq.

The decision of many of the groups' members to switch sides was a key factor in the success this year of a series of U.S. offensives to clear Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgents from Baqubah. But the militants, who had declared the city to be the capital of their Islamic caliphate, remain entrenched in the palm groves in the Diyala River valley, where much of the fighting is taking place.

A witness said the woman approached the volunteers, who have formed a citizens group to help secure Muqdadiya, claiming to have a question. The volunteers gather at the building on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. As people approached the woman to help her, she detonated explosives strapped to her waist, said the witness, Ammar Fadhil.

"At first, we didn't understand what had happened," he said. "But later, we saw corpses, dismembered bodies and some body parts."

An Iraqi security official identified the bomber as Suhailah Hussein Chlayeb, a woman believed to be in her late 40s or early 50s who had three sons who were killed by the Iraqi army. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to address the media.

Elsewhere in Diyala, an Iraqi army convoy was ambushed north of Muqdadiya by men firing AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. Six soldiers and five volunteers were killed, said U.S. Army Maj. Peggy Kageleiry, a military spokeswoman. Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded and an unspecified number of assailants were detained.

Less than 20 miles away, an Iraqi policeman was killed and four were wounded in a roadside bombing northwest of Mansouriya, Kageleiry said. But Iraqi security forces said a suicide bomber drove his car into a checkpoint, killing at least seven Iraqi soldiers and three volunteers. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the two accounts.

In other violence around Iraq, gunmen ambushed and killed a Sunni tribal leader, along with his four guards, who had been working with the U.S. in the northern village of Rabia near the Syrian border, police said.

Also in the north, oil gushed into the Tigris River after an explosion damaged a pipeline supplying crude from the city of Kirkuk to the refinery in Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad. A dark cloud hung over the spot where the pipeline ruptured and the oil was burning, said an official with the Facilities Protection Service in Kirkuk, which secures government installations. Officials suspended the flow of crude from Kirkuk to the refinery until the damage is repaired.

Also in Kirkuk, one person was killed and another injured in a drive-by shooting, police said. A farmer also was gunned down in a nearby village.

In Baghdad, police recovered three bodies, apparent victims of sectarian killings. The toll was far lower than the 30 or more bodies that were recovered daily before the U.S. troop buildup began early this year.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com