Jonathan Schell on an administration of grammarians (TomDispatch)

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"Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm -- ushered in not by us, but by terrorists -- requires new thinking in the law of war." (President George W. Bush in a February 7, 2002 memo asserting "that he believed he had 'the authority under the Constitution' to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to combatants picked up during the war in Afghanistan." (Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt, Memo on Interrogation Tactics Is Disavowed, the Washington Post)

"Some of the documents showed that the administration originally had no intention of making its internal debate public anytime soon. Mr. Rumsfeld's April 16, 2003, memo authorizing the limited use of more aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay was stamped 'Declassify On: 2 April 2013.'" (Richard W. Stevenson, White House Says Prisoner Policy Set Humane Tone, the New York Times)

Who knew that what we had was an administration of -- as Jonathan Schell puts it below -- lexicographers, grammarians, and philologists, intent on parsing sentences, slicing meanings, arguing over the exact definitions of words, the exact point, for instance, where torture becomes torture, and whether in finding that point they hadn't stopped just short of, or gone just beyond but quickly rescinded, or recommended but never used, or used but only once, or maybe twice, and real far away, and not as hard as…

Yesterday, the President stated unequivocally: "Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being." But as we've learned in recent weeks, "torture" is an all too malleable term, and what is never being ordered is all in the definition.

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