Unqualified Offerings

By Mona

English-language maven William Safire in his NYT column yesterday, On Language: Waterboarding, begins by declaring: “Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes.” He continues, my emphasis in bold:

If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for “twist,” means anything (and it means “the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce”), then waterboarding is a means of torture. The predecessor terms for its various forms are water torture, water cure and water treatment.

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President Theodore Roosevelt disapproved [of waterboarding in the Phillipines], and in 1902 ordered the dismissal of the United States general in charge [who had permitting some waterboarding]. . . [and in a letter to a German friend noting tha the Filipinos committed worse atrocities said], “Nevertheless, torture is not a thing that we can tolerate.”

To more recent times: in 1953, a U.S. fighter pilot told United Press that North Korean captors gave him the “water treatment” in which “they would bend my head back, put a towel over my face and pour water over the towel. I could not breathe. . . . When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again.”

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Why did boarding take over from cure, treatment and torture? Darius Rejali, the author of the recent book “Torture and Democracy” and a professor at Reed College, has an answer: “There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding” — a word found as early as 1929 — “they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them.”