Press Center > News from NCTE > Article:126053 - November 13, 2006
Author Steven H. Miles, M.D., Earns Orwell Award for Honest and Clear Language


Steven H. Miles, M.D, author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, is the winner of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 2006 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.  The NCTE Public Language Committee calls Miles’ book “a searing and silence-breaking book that indicts the American medical profession of complicity with the forms of torture now routinely carried out in US detention facilities in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.  The honor will be announced at NCTE’s Annual Convention in Nashville, during the Convention’s General Session.  The General Session is Sunday, November 19, at 10:00 a.m., at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center.

The NCTE Public Language Committee says, “Miles’s Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror is well worthy of the Orwell Award.  In Oath Betrayed, Dr. Miles shows not only that American medical personnel have falsified death certificates for detainees killed by coercive interrogations, but also that American psychiatrists and psychologists, working in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, have actually used detainees' medical information to devise ‘physically and psychologically coercive interrogation plans’ tailored to individual interrogations.”

The Public Language Committee continues, “Such practices, as Dr. Miles argues, violate the American Medical Association’s strictures against the participation by medical personnel in torture; they violate the widespread international consensus, forged in the wake of the Holocaust, that doctors have no business aiding and facilitating gross human rights atrocities; they violate every moral precept associated with the practice of modern medicine.”

Doublespeak Award Goes to the President of the United States

President George W. Bush is the recipient of the 2006 Doublespeak Award from NCTE for his Jackson Square speech on Hurricane Katrina and disaster relief, September 15, 2005. During Bush’s September 15 address, he remarked,
 
“As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.” 

However, a week before the President’s speech, he signed an executive order suspending the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, thereby allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage. 

Conferred by the NCTE Public Language Committee, the award is an ironic "tribute" to American public figures who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory. The award will be announced at NCTE’s Annual Convention General Session, Sunday, November 19, at 10:00 a.m.

The National Council of Teachers of English, with 50,000 individual and institutional members worldwide, is dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.  For more information, please visit www.ncte.org.

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