“POLITICAL language”, wrote George Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
No leader will admit to having had people tortured, but Dick Cheney did say: “I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme”—which means the same thing. Notice how, as Orwell put it, “A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”
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Jesús Romero Trillo