Alberto Gonzales has added softspeak, a modification of newspeak, to the
Orwellian lexicon, although Sen. Joe Biden had another term for it: “Pure malarkey!” That’s how
Biden, fed up with Gonzales’s lack of candor, characterized the Attorney General nominee’s
testimony in this morning’s Senate
hearing. (A big tip of the hat, too, to Sen. Ted Kennedy for not
pussyfooting around.)
Here’s how softspeak works: Asked by Sen. Pat Leahy whether he believes in holding
policy makers accountable for their decisions — in this case military and civilian leaders who
condoned torture — Gonzales replied: “If there’s an allegation that we’ve done something wrong,
we investigate it.” He then listed a handful of investigations into the torture at Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo and other military detention camps. What Gonzales failed to say was that, of the
“requisite half-dozen investigations, none [were] empowered to touch those who devised the
policies,” as Mark Danner writes this morning in “We Are All Torturers.”
Newspeak, you may recall, is the official language of Oceania and is commonly
defined as ambiguous and contradictory language that deliberately misleads and manipulates the
public. Thus softspeak may be defined as direct and unambiguous language that
nonetheless deliberately misleads and manipulates the public to draw a false conclusion — in this
case, that he and the Bush regime believe in
accountability.
The New York Times account (as of 2:15 pm ET), I see
that both ignore Biden’s great piece of plainspeak, which just happened to be the most
galvanizing moment of the morning session. Both reports read like softspeak press
releases.
