Euphemisms Die Hard within Iraq discussion......

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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1126-24.htm

Published on Sunday, November 26, 2006 by the Press & Sun Bulletin (Binghamton, New York)
Euphemisms Die Hard within Iraq Discussion
by David Rossie

Q: Do this country's news organizations have a greater obligation to their readers and viewers or to the federal government?
A: Are you kidding?

Q: When does a euphemism become a lie?

A: When it no longer disguises the lie.

Q: When are the news organizations going to stop lying to the public?

A: Don't hold your breath.

In a speech he gave several months ago, Bill Moyers recalled asking News Hour host Jim Lehrer when he was going to start referring to the U. S. military occupation of Iraq as an occupation. Lehrer's answer: When the Bush administration starts calling it an occupation. Until then, he and his team would stick with the administration's euphemism "liberation."

Eventually, the administration got around to admitting that the occupation was an occupation, and the news services were free to, in Howard Cosell's ungrammatical words, tell it like it is.

Other euphemisms die harder. For example, everyone who can read between the lines and anyone who has been to Iraq knows there is a bloody civil war being waged there and that our troops are caught in the middle of it.

But just as in Vietnam, civil war has such a negative and unmanageable ring to it, the administration prefers insurgency, or sectarian violence, or in particularly bloody manifestations, "escalating sectarian violence." That reduces civil war to something on the order of an inter-family feud.

Of all the ugly euphemisms this war has given birth to, "contractor" is the most misleading and most odious. And it is one with which the media have come to terms.

In today's accepted parlance, a "contractor" is an individual, usually a former military specialist, who has signed on with a private company and has gone to Iraq to serve as bodyguard or armed escort for private construction or transport companies. And in some cases to guard U. S. generals and dignitaries.

Even the euphemism is a misnomer. These contractors, or security guards as they are sometimes referred to, are not contractors. They are what the soldiers and Marines in Iraq call them: mercenaries.

But mercenaries is such an ugly term. It invites comparison with those Hessians the British hired to help put down our own 18th century insurgency, later known as the Revolutionary War. Or those soldiers of fortune who more recently sold their services to African governments and rebel leaders alike.

Last weekend, it was revealed that five "contractors" employed by the Crescent Security Group" had been abducted in southern Iraq. American television carried tearful interviews with some of their relatives.

Less well covered was a court proceeding in Virginia in which two former "contractors" claimed they had been blacklisted by their former employer, Triple Canopy -- a private military contracting company, because they reported that their former supervisor had committed violent felonies possibly including murder against Iraqis while in their presence.

As a result of the blacklisting, the men argued, they have been unable to find similar employment in the burgeoning overseas private security business, jobs that pay on average $500 a day.

A friend said he was approached with an offer to join one of the contracting organizations when he was returning from active duty with the Marine Corps in Iraq.

The thought of making $200,000 a year for what he'd been doing on a sergeant's pay was tempting, he said, but not that tempting.

David Rossie is associate editor of the Press & Sun-Bulletin.