With the stealth of a Covid vari­ant, the mean­ing of many things that mat­ter is being dis­tort­ed by ever-more ubiq­ui­tous use of weasel words, which despite being two words, is defined as: “A word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forth­right state­ment or posi­tion.”  

Weasel words come in many guis­es, and often hide in the mid­dle of what seem to be oth­er­wise rea­son­able state­ments. Con­sid­er the one high­light­ed in the fol­low­ing quote by Gen­er­al Richard D. Clarke, the out­go­ing head of U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand: “We can­not cre­ate anoth­er gen­er­a­tion of ter­ror­ists because we have been lax in our pro­ce­dures and have unnec­es­sar­i­ly harmed civil­ian bystanders.”
No doubt the Gen­er­al meant “unnec­es­sar­i­ly” in the best sense, but he remind­ed me of an exceed­ing­ly well-read friend whose enthu­si­asm for her lit­er­ary pas­sion of the moment would occa­sion­al­ly bub­ble over into near bab­ble. When­ev­er it was point­ed out, she invari­ably replied: “You’re sup­posed to lis­ten to what I mean, not what I say.”
Since of course we’d all like to be clear about what the Gen­er­al meant, per­haps in the next inter­view he could address a few fol­low-up questions:
Does that mean there is a cat­e­go­ry of “nec­es­sar­i­ly harmed” (read ‘killed’) civilians?
If so, who decides which ones fit that category?
What are the cri­te­ria for it?
How many peo­ple met it?”
(For the record, dur­ing a five-year peri­od (2016 to 2021 inclu­sive) in Afghanistan alone an esti­mat­ed 1,600 civil­ians died in air strikes. Forty per­cent of them were children.)

                                          IT MATTERS

Clear answers to the ques­tions are all the more rel­e­vant in view of recent boasts that the “war on ter­ror” can be fought from “over the horizon”.
The lat­est much-tout­ed exam­ple of the effi­ca­cy of that is the report­ed killing of al-Qae­da leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The strike seems to have been pin­point, although no actu­al proof, oth­er than what might be termed “over the hori­zon” inter­pre­ta­tions of its after­math, have been forth­com­ing at the time of writing.
That’s not to say U.S. claims of care­ful and accu­rate tar­get­ing are false or over­ly exag­ger­at­ed. The use of ‘smart’ bombs, mis­siles and drone strikes does great­ly reduce civil­ian casu­al­ties. In Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, for exam­ple, I saw what were appar­ent­ly mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment facil­i­ties destroyed by bombs dropped from tens of thou­sands of meters and cruise mis­siles fired from hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters away, with lit­tle or no dam­age to and no deaths in or around near­by civil­ian apart­ments and oth­er buildings.|
How­ev­er, in my expe­ri­ence, that’s often due more to cir­cum­stance than sci­ence and technology.
Dur­ing the NATO air strikes in sup­port of forces try­ing to over­throw Muam­mar Khadafy, for­eign jour­nal­ists work­ing under strict regime super­vi­sion in Tripoli were tak­en (in the mid­dle of the night) to see an apart­ment build­ing destroyed by a NATO air strike. There was ample evi­dence in the rub­ble, includ­ing dead bod­ies, that it had been occu­pied by civil­ians. A bystander sidled up behind me and whis­pered: “I am afraid. But I will tell you the truth. There were anti-air­craft guns behind this building.”
They would be a legit­i­mate tar­get. Since our Libyan “min­ders” refused to take us to the back of the build­ing, it seemed fair to report the dev­as­ta­tion as evi­dence of what hap­pens when ‘smart’ turns out to have been ‘dumb’.
If the mil­i­tary wants to keep “over the hori­zon” out of the weasel word ter­ri­to­ry into which it is already stray­ing, they need to acknowl­edge that there always have been and always will be, civil­ian casualties.

                              LEARNING BY EXAMPLE

But then again, if they’re tak­ing their cue from the way news is report­ed, the Pen­ta­gon spin­meis­ters are onto something.
When was the last time you heard a news report that didn’t include the network’s name and: “..source told…”, or “…sources say…”?
 By def­i­n­i­tion any­one who tells a jour­nal­ist any­thing is a source. By what stretch of the imag­i­na­tion does stat­ing the obvi­ous, with­out fur­ther qual­i­fi­caf­tion, make a news sto­ry any­thing but a new lev­el of weasel wording?
The prac­tice reminds me of an old joke on source def­i­n­i­tions from the days when jour­nal­ists gath­ered around a bar at the end of a long day.
Informed source – the guy next to me at the bar.
Well-informed source – who­ev­er bought the last round.
High­ly placed source — the one who just ordered the next round on his tab.
No prop­er reporter I know ever actu­al­ly sourced sto­ries or quotes that way, but it does rather neat­ly sum up the glib­ness in far too many news reports today, espe­cial­ly in broad­cast news.
The wor­ry is that both the media and the mil­i­tary, to name the two most egre­gious offend­ers, are mak­ing weasel words acceptable.

P.S. None of the for­go­ing in any way reflects on my feel­ings about real weasels. Click here to learn why.
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