Why Words Matter

Last year, in the lead up to the presidential election, I debated the merits of the candidates offered by the two major parties with friends who found both of them wanting, and blamed the parties for the mediocre choices they had. I'm not here to discuss the merits of their position, or my response, so much as I am the rhetoric we ended up using. At least one, if not both, utilized the word "disenfranchised" to describe their feelings.

Last year, during the same election, John Kerry was haunted by his testimony before Congress over 30 years ago. Again, forget whether the focus on these comments was appropriate for a moment. During his statements, he referred to "atrocities" committed by his fellow soldiers in Vietnam.

Now, read today's column by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post...

When Amnesty International's secretary general, Irene Khan, described Guantanamo as "the gulag of our times," her group got plenty of attention, including a strong response from President Bush. "Absurd," he said, dismissing the group's report as relying on charges from "people who hate America."

The substantive debate over the conditions at Gitmo and elsewhere, the treatment of the Koran and the use of interrogations techniques that approach torture is an important one to have, for it shows that Americans are willing to confront flaws in our system. But now the argument seems to be about an inflammatory word that conjures up a very different political system.

In short, if you're going to toss a loaded grenade of a word like gulag, you'd better be able to back it up.

Which is why the "Fox News Sunday" interview of Amnesty's U.S. chief, William Schulz, was quite revealing.

CHRIS WALLACE: Mr. Schulz, the Soviet gulag was a system of slave labor camps that went on for more than 30 years. More than 1.6 million deaths were documented. Whatever has happened at Guantanamo, do you stand by the comparison to the Soviet gulag?

SCHULZ: Well, Chris, clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy. And the secretary general has acknowledged that. There's no question. . . . In size and in duration, there are not similarities between U.S. detention facilities and the gulag. People are not being starved in those facilities. They're not being subjected to forced labor. But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared -- held in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families. And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed. . . .

WALLACE: Is it possible, sir, that by excessive rhetoric or by your political links, that you have hurt, not helped, your cause?

SCHULZ: Chris, I don't think I'd be on this station, on this program today with you if Amnesty hadn't said what it said and President Bush and his colleagues haven't responded as they did. If I had come to you two weeks ago and said, "Chris, I'd like to go on FOX with you just to talk about U.S. detention policies at Guantanamo and elsewhere," I suspect you wouldn't have given me an invitation.

WALLACE: So you're saying if you make irresponsible charges, that's good for the cause?

SCHULZ: I don't believe that they're irresponsible.

Excuse me, but did Schulz say that it's okay to unleash words like "gulag," even if it's not an "exact or literal analogy," because it gets him booked on Fox News? Is that the new standard? Yes, Chris, I called the president a war criminal because it was the only way I could get on Hardball?

As Kurtz goes on to note, it's rare when both the Washington Post and the Washington Times opt to run editorials supporting the same position, but they did here. And when Andrew Sullivan, who spends most of his time ringing alarm bells about America's use of questionable interrogation techniques and detention practices during the War on Terror, attacks Amnesty for this "moral idiocy", you know Amnesty has thrown its good name under the bus for political reasons.

The word "gulag" is politically loaded. It has a meaning. To a lesser extent, the same is true with "disenfranchised" -- I tend to think of African-Americans in the South before the civil rights movement.

And the same is true with the word "atrocities" -- the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge and Rwanda come to mind. Using those words out of context diminishes the point you're trying to make, as well as what really happened in those instances.

But gulag is far worse -- it would be like Kerry using "Holocaust" instead of atrocity. Anne Applebaum lays it in the Post...

Amnesty, by misusing language, by discarding its former neutrality, and by handing the administration an easy way to brush off "ridiculous" accusations, also deprives itself of what should be its best ally. The United States, as the world's largest and most powerful democracy, remains, for all its flaws, the world's best hope for the promotion of human rights. If Amnesty still believes in its stated mission, its leaders should push American democratic institutions to influence U.S. policy for the good of the world, and not attack the American government for the satisfaction of their own political faction.

That sums it up nicely. I'm guessing Amnesty's donations from America-haters will take off from the publicity this generates. But the hit to their credibility will last much longer than the money.