Say anything

I have just finished reading Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage, an excellent novel which deals with a situation not unlike East Timor, in which I stumbled on the following passage:

"Only their own silence can damn the guilty.

It doesn't mater how cynical a pretext may be, how gratuitous the act, how cruel in its execution, so long as mouths move, words are said, statement issued, then anything can be justified. A weak argument, stated confidently, becomes a strong argument. 'Spokesmen' say something, anything, any nonsense, the words might as well have no meaning or the special meanings attached to doublespeak, and then there appears to be a case made, a position established. Say anything - it's only words and they have the same valency as those of the victim. The world doesn't see what actually happened. It merely hears a 'balanced' account, both sides getting the same amount of air-time (if the victim is lucky), and that device equals things out to the culprit's advantage.

The reality is separate from the words."

Then I run across this bit of nonsense in which Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Fran Townsend "explains" away the accusations of torture.



I'm certainly satisfied. I hope the rest of you are as well.