Strata Lucida

Slippery language

Law professor Leila Sadat was interviewed in Salon about the Red Cross report on conditions in Guantánamo's prison camp. She echoes my comment about the ambiguity of the report's most important phrase:

I was just listening to the media and they don't want to say it was torture. They say "tantamount to torture." ... I'm thinking to myself what does "tantamount to torture" mean? I suppose what the Red Cross could be doing is declining to give a legal opinion on whether it's torture or not and leaving that to others.

"Tantamount" is one of those words with a delicious, almost Derridean shiftiness. On the one hand, it signifies nothing other than a pure equivalence or equality. "Delay was tantamount to ruin." But on the other hand, in its typical usage, it is almost always intended to minimize whatever equivalence is being proposed: to evoke "almost like" or "nearly the same as"; in other words, to deny the equivalence in the very same move as you affirm it. "Tantamount" is a copula made to disavow its own paternity, to allow the speaker to intend either a pure identity, a pure difference, or both at the same time.

This is why I called the use of "tantamount" in this situation a "doublethink" tactic. Where Orwell was, in his rationalistic way, horrified that people could affirm two mutually contradictory premises, I see this as a natural feature of our language and (perhaps) our consiciousness. It's uncanny and impolite to approach this topic with straightforward language: you just don't want to admit that your government is wearing the black hats this time. So you dance around it with glib Latinate dressing, leaving enough room for the government to claim it's not torture (because the activities were only "tantamount" to torture) while the lefty critics claim it is torture (because that's what "tantamount" means). Unable to face the ugly truth, we allow reality to slip out the back door while we're busy putting curtains on the front door. Here's Sadat again, on the reality of what's going on in Guantánamo:

It's torture. A lot of these techniques have been looked at in other countries; there's been a lot of litigation about them. They seem pretty clearly to be prohibited by the torture convention and I suppose even those that don’t amount to torture would nonetheless qualify as cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment, and that is also a legal definition.

The prison camp's status as a legal "black hole," where the normal rule of law does not apply, gets mirrored in the media reports about the camp: activities there both are and are not torture, both are and are not legal, both are and are not humane. Guantánamo is not just a black hole for the rule of law; it's a black hole for the concept of meaning. This is why the Red Cross, defenders after all of the notion of some minimum of universal human rights, can't even approach the subject without qualified and ambiguous language. But by allowing their condemnation to be couched in ambiguous terms, they allow the government just enough wiggle room to justify its actions.

Posted by Chris at December 1, 2004 09:24 AM