What's in a Word? Torture............... (from NYTimes)

[kentuck]

He who controls the language controls the people.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/opinion/23HOCH.html

<snip>
As Orwell pointed out most effectively, governments control language as well as people. Since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, our government, from the highest officials in Washington to Army prison guards in Baghdad, have used every euphemism they can think of to avoid the word that clearly characterizes what some of our soldiers and civilian contractors have been doing: torture.

<snip>
• "Sleep management." This apparently benign term — doctors use it in discussing insomnia — disguises a form of torture that has long been popular because it requires no special equipment and leaves no marks on the body. Widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches by inquisitors, it was called the tormentum insomniae. Hundreds of years later, in the interrogation rooms of Stalin's secret police, it was known as the "conveyor belt," because relays of interrogators would question a prisoner, day and night, until he or she signed the desired statement and named enough co-conspirators.

<snip>
•"Water-boarding." This, as we now know, does not involve water skis, but holding prisoners under water for long enough that they think they are drowning. Again, interrogators favor it because after the prisoner has coughed the water out of his lungs, it leaves no identifiable marks. Reports by human rights groups on countries including Brazil, Ethiopia and El Salvador have noted the prevalence of "simulated drowning" or "near drowning."

•"Stress positions." What is a stress position? Mike Xego, a former political prisoner in South Africa, once demonstrated one for me. He bent down and clasped his hands in front of him as if they were handcuffed, and then, using a rolled-up newspaper, showed me how apartheid-era police officers would pin his elbows behind his knees with a stick, forcing him into a permanent crouch. "You'd be passed from one hand to another. Kicked. Tipped over," he explained. "The blood stops moving. You scream and scream and scream until there is no voice."

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