Dehumanizing jargon like ‘interrogation subject’ conditions audiences to accept torture

Evidence

By now, Ignatieff’s readers may be ready to accept his stipulation that the question is not simply torture but rather that “the problem lies in identifying the justifying exceptions and defining what forms of duress stop short of absolute degradation of an interrogation subject”—that is, how much, when, and where to twist arms, break bones, or pile prisoners naked on top of one another for a picture. Even now we must be careful not to be derailed by this obscenity, because the real atrocity lies in the phrase “an interrogation subject”: the prisoner has ceased to be a person with a name, a family, convictions, politics, humanity. He or she is nothing but “an interrogation subject” ready to be tortured at Abu Ghraib or some nameless Israeli site. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 295

Categorization

• DEFINE: Euphemism as a rhetorical mechanism: technical language progressively replaces morally loaded terms until cruelty is normalized.