May we use cookies to track your activities We take your privacy very seriously Please see our privacy policy for details and any questions Yes No WELCOME NOV 21 2019 SUBSCRIBE LOGIN OPINION Donald Trump Is Annihilating Truth Itself President Donald Trump addresses the media in front of the White House this week Jacquelyn Martin AP Karen Greenberg TomDispatch These days witnessing the administration’s never-ending cruelty at the border the shenanigans of a White House caught red-handed in attempted bribery in Ukraine and the disarray of this country’s foreign policy I feel like I’m seeing a much-scarier remake of a familiar old movie The cast of characters and the headlines are different but the thinking underlying it all is in many ways eerily reminiscent of what we as a nation experienced during the early years of the Global War on Terror particularly when it We use cookies to analyze our traffic We also share information about your use with our social media advertising and comes to the interactions between the White House and the public As then so today there is distrust analytics partners By clicking Accept you agree that Truthdig may store cookies on your device You may also get more there are on con thereconsent is little in the way of a widely agreed upon narrative about what’s information ouricting use of facts cookiesand or revoke happening no less how to interpret those events ACCEPT DIG THIS The most blatant attack on facts comes in the form of the unabashed lying of President Donald Trump who obfuscates and changes his many stories with impressive regularity By this October after almost WELCOME 1 000 days SUBSCRIBE in of ce according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s database he had made 13 435LOGIN false or misleading claims He had lied about immigration the stock market the impact his sanctions and tariffs were having on the American economy U S troop withdrawals from the Middle East the size of his crowds and even the weather which of course is just the beginning of a far longer list Still despite the breadth of his falsehoods the president’s behavior has actually been anything but novel at a fundamental level After all President George W Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney took this country to war based on an outright lie — that there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal in Iraq — a falsehood which cost the U S  more than a trillion dollars and took staggering numbers of Iraqi and American lives a war that has never really ended and is widely seen as Trump and Bernie Sanders have both said as the worst mistake in our history The corrosiveness of of cial lying has long been the subject of philosophers Hannah Arendt  writing about the Pentagon Papers and the corrosive effects of falsehoods back in 1971 called “the right to unmanipulated factual information” basic one “without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel hoax ” But it’s important to note that when it comes to the Trump presidency there is so much more to the strategy of degrading public discourse and debasing the facts than anything as simple and straightforward as mere lying Political scientist Kelly Greenhill has aptly termed Trump’s assault on the truth “extra-factual information ” pointing to “distraction threat con ation normalization and repetition” as among the methods he employs to make facts anything but what they used to be ADVERTISEMENT Quiz Where Did You Grow Up Let's have some fun For Trump lying is but the tip of the iceberg and in this he re ects far more than his own predilections He re ects as well our moment our age George Orwell that prescient twentieth-century observer We use cookies to analyze our traffic We also share information about your use with our social media advertising and warnedpartners in his classic essay “Politics and the Language” about aspect of such a lying analytics By clicking Accept you agree that English Truthdig may store cookies onone your key device You may also get more information on our use“lack of cookies or revokein consent mindset the way of precision” language can pose a danger to society and to political stability ACCEPT DIG THIS When it comes to imprecision today the dangers couldn’t be more real In fact the strategies employed in Washington to confuse and mislead the public have subtly eaten away at the country’s collective mindset WELCOME creating fertile ground for Trumpian-style lying to successfully take root  In many ways the SUBSCRIBE LOGIN focus on Donald Trump’s blatant and persistent lying only serves to obfuscate other no less destructive methods of deceiving the public that preceded him into the White House and helped create the conditions that make the president’s lies so destabilizing Consider just six ways in which in this century imprecision and cloudiness have come to de ne American political discourse The Recasting of Language  The gutting of the customary uses of language and the substitution of new imprecise replacements has as Orwell warned set the stage for lying and duplicity to multiply Of cials of the Bush administration for instance rede ned basic legal terms speci cally to circumvent the law Instead of “prisoners” at their Guantanamo Bay detention center they had “detainees ” Instead of “lawful enemy combatants ” they just had “enemy combatants ” a term without a commonly understood or precise de nition that conveniently skipped the idea of lawfulness entirely In her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem  Arendt reminded us how new “language rules” became part and parcel of the Nazi propaganda world in ways meant to confuse the public about the changing German reality The forced imprisonment of Jews in concentration camps was for instance referred to as a “change of residence ” In The Death of Truth Michiko Kakutani re ects on Trump’s version of such an “assault on language ” his penchant in particular for “the taking of words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating them with personal agendas and political partisanship ” As examples she notes his use of words “to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean ” particularly the way he took the words of his accusers and robbed them of meaning by turning them back on the accusers themselves For instance Hillary Clinton “colluded” with Ukraine not he with Russia ditto of course for Hunter and Joe Biden Words in other words become exactly what he cares to make of them Uncertain Numbers  Numbers which otherwise might seem so precise have similarly been used to create a sense of imprecision in Washington  A short trip down memory lane should remind us of some of the ways in which vagueness and imprecision were instrumental parts of the war on terror in particular For Donald Rumsfeld President George W Bush’s secretary of defense numerical precision of a distinctly imprecise sort provided an effective means of refusing to offer any meaningful information to the media on the administration’s illegal acts He had for instance a penchant for referring to the number of detainees at Guantanamo in approximate rather than speci c terms “More than 150 ” for instance sounded innocuously close to precise but also served his purpose — creating a lackuse ofcookies transparency theWe administration’s war about on terror We to analyzearound our traffic also share information your use with our social media advertising and analytics partners By clicking Accept you agree that Truthdig may store cookies on your device You may also get more information on our use of cookies or revoke consent The detention of migrants at the border in the Trump years echoes Rumsfeld’s refusal to share real ACCEPT DIG THIS numbers but has gone even further in creating a kind of numerical imprecision around reality itself  The U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency ICE has for instance been strikingly obstructionist when it comes to announcing the numbers of migrants in its custody Last July for instance WELCOME Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan claimed that SUBSCRIBE LOGIN fewer than 1 000 children had been separated from their parents As it turned out he wasn’t even close to accurate Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions alone 2 800 families had been separated in this fashion Only recently a suit brought by the ACLU led to the release of government statistics showing that an additional 1 500 families had in fact experienced such separations Willful Ignorance  Hiding or ignoring facts has been yet another tactic integral to the deception of these years The Bush administration for instance purposely disregarded then-CIA Director George Tenet’s comments about the striking lack of certainty regarding the presence of nuclear and biological weaponry in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq Instead they relied on false claims about the presence of WMDs in Iraq as the premise for invading that country Sometimes Bush of cials quite deliberately put their heads in the sand rather than face reality For example when the rst accounts of the grim abuse of Iraqi captives at the American prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were reported by CBS News and later even by Fox News in 2004  according to journalist Andrew Cockburn Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith “sent an urgent memo round the Pentagon warning of cials not to read such reports or even discuss them with family members ” More recently upon the release of the Mueller Report President Trump expanded on this strategy applying it to himself when he boasted that “I have not seen the Mueller report I have not read the Mueller report I won No collusion no obstruction ” Unabashedly choosing to bury his head in the sand in a similar fashion Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told the media that he wouldn’t read the transcripts of witnesses at the initial closed Congressional impeachment proceedings when they were made public “I made up my mind… There’s nothing there ”  Several Republican senators including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have similarly said that they won’t be watching the House impeachment hearings claiming they have “better things to do ” Withholding Evidence  In addition to ignoring facts and embracing ignorance withholding evidence has been one obvious path to blunting awareness From the rst Abu Ghraib photos to today’s military commissions at Guantanamo evidence of torture has for instance been purposely withheld or misrepresented  Likewise the Trump administration has consistently withheld documents and records about its migrant detention system and the methods used in it as illustrated by a determination to claim of We cials to testify in Congress onour the subject We useabsolute cookies toimmunity analyze our for traffic alsorefusing share information about your use with social media Similarly advertisingICE andhas analytics By clicking Accept agree that Truthdig mayand store cookies on your device You may also getthe moreuse refusedpartners to release records of theyou agency’s surveillance data-collection methods including information on our use of cookies or revoke consent of facial-recognition software at the border It’s no surprise then that the White House has employed ACCEPT DIG theTHIS same tactic — not allowing of cials of all sorts to testify before Congress — in the ongoing impeachment hearings As the whistleblower in the Ukraine quid pro quo bribery scandal has informed us White House lawyers were directed “to remove the electronic transcript of Trump’s phone WELCOME conversation SUBSCRIBE areLOGIN with the Ukrainian president from the computer system in which such transcripts typically stored for coordination nalization and distribution to Cabinet-level of cials ” The Destruction of the Record  A fth tactic meant to confuse and enable governmental lying in these years has been the destruction of the facts themselves  Worse than linguistic sloppiness omissions and willful ignorance has been the actual destruction of potentially incriminating documents We of course only know about examples of this that have come to light The Bush administration pioneered such tactics We know for instance that Jose Rodriguez director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service  destroyed tapes of sessions with war-on-terror prisoners in Agency “black sites” around the world in which so-called enhanced interrogation techniques acts of torture were used Prosecutor John Durham who is now tasked by Attorney General Barr with looking into the origins of the Mueller Russia investigation was asked by Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey and then Obama Attorney General Eric Holder to look into the destruction of those tapes only to conclude that there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue charges Under Trump a strategy of destroying government records has evolved into one of not creating such records to begin with In 2017 for instance the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington led a suit charging the Trump administration with violating the Presidential Records Act PRA by using an encrypted application designed to delete the contents of the president’s email messages This May the two groups along with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations led a complaint against the White House for violating the PRA and the Federal Records Act by failing to create records of conversations with foreign leaders Last month the plaintiffs intensi ed their efforts by asking a judge for an immediate injunction to require the White House to preserve the records of all calls with foreign leaders Spreading Conflicting Facts  Trump and his team have added a new layer of confusion to all of this by making the spreading of contradictory stories a normal part of everyday life in Washington The impeachment hearings are a case in point Potential administration witnesses say one thing one day only to contradict it without blinking soon after Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney for instance  said that there had indeed been a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky only to retract his statement hours later Gordon Sondland the U S ambassador to the European Union who became a key gure in the Ukraine negotiations rst claimed that there was “no quid pro quo ” only to later revise his testimony “I now recall” otherwise he acknowledged in a supplemental declaration issued three weeks later Military aid had in fact been withheld pending a Ukrainian agreement Hunter Biden andabout Burisma We use cookies to analyzeto ourinvestigate traffic We also share information your use with our social media advertising and analytics partners By clicking Accept you agree that Truthdig may store cookies on your device You may also get more information on our use of cookies or revoke consent This is increasingly the norm and not just in relation to the impeachment hearings either Only recently ACCEPT DIG forTHIS instance White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow told reporters that China and the U S had reached an agreement about reducing tariffs only to be contradicted within hours by the president’s senior trade advisor who swore that no such agreement existed And so it goes in Washington as 2019 comes to WELCOME an end SUBSCRIBE LOGIN The New Norm in Washington Of course neither George W Bush nor Donald Trump invented such methods of compromising truth and facts but in recent years this has become something like the new norm Through the centuries as Orwell and Arendt made clear long ago the connection between the integrity of language the validity of facts and the strength of any country has been acknowledged The Greek historian Thucydides writing about the Peloponnesian Wars thousands of years ago associated the gutting of language with the dissolution of the state “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally… moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness ability to see all sides of a question inaptness to act on any ” Historically the degradation of words has gone hand in hand with the undermining of stability for which the accepted meaning of things remains essential Armed with the integrity of words knowledge can be shared among a citizenry otherwise chaos becomes the order of the day In his farewell to the nation George Washington himself an admirer of the classical thinkers tied such diffusion of knowledge the means by which the government could “give force to public opinion ” to the strength of the republic Today in Donald Trump’s Washington anything goes linguistically speaking Sadly words are more important than we as a nation seem to believe They are the bedrock on which facts are built and facts are the bedrock on which nations stand in order to make decisions The Trump administration has little respect for the integrity of words no respect for educating the public with the facts and every intention of clouding the space between fact and ction certainty and uncertainty Perhaps the best strategy for nding our way forward is to hold one another accountable rst and foremost for the very words we use Karen J Greenberg a TomDispatch regular is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law as well as the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief and the foreign-policy blog Vital Interests She is the author and editor of many books among them Rogue Justice The Making of the Security State and The Least Worst Place Guantánamo’s First 100 Days Julia Tedesco helped with research for this article We use cookies to analyze our traffic We also share information about your use with our social media advertising and analytics partners By clicking Accept you agree that Truthdig may store cookies on your device You may also get more Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and us on Facebook Check out the newest Dispatch Books John information on our use of cookies or revokejoin consent Feffer’s new dystopian novel the second in the Splinterlands series  Frostlands  Beverly Gologorsky’s ACCEPT DIG THIS novel Every Body Has a Story  and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century The Rise and Decline of U S Global Power and John WELCOME Dower’s The Violent American Century War and Terror Since World War II SUBSCRIBE IN THIS ARTICLE #abu ghraib #donald rumsfeld #donald trump #eichmann in jerusalem #george orwell #george w bush #guantanamo #hannah arendt #ukraine #washington post MOST POPULAR Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment Ralph Nader We Have a Congress of Cowards How to Save the Planet and Ourselves OK Obama It’s Time to Cancel Centrism We use cookies to analyze our traffic We also share information about your use with our social media advertising and Bernie Sanders' Stance on Bolivia Matters analytics partners By clicking 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