A Marine Tutorial on Media Spin ("killings" is a misnomer)

[wtmusic]

"Military hearings (Haditha) began last month. But the episode might have gone unexamined if not for Tim McGirk, a reporter for Time magazine. In January 2006, he sent an e-mail message to the Second Marine Division in Haditha, asking questions that clearly conveyed his suspicion that an atrocity had been committed.

The Second Division wanted a response to each question from its Third Battalion, which was responsible for fighting insurgents in Haditha. So on Jan. 29, 2006, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, gathered his executive officer, Maj. Kevin M. Gonzalez, Capt. Lucas M. McConnell, the commander of the company involved in the shootings, and First Lt. Adam P. Mathes, to hash out answers.

The four officers produced a five-page memo of “talking points” and answers that displayed a searing view of American journalists conspiring to undermine the war effort.

<>

Memo: Legitimate engagement: we will not acknowledge this reporter’s attempt to stain the engagement with the misnomer “killings.”

Yes, we are still fighting terrorists of Al Qaida in Iraq in Haditha. (“Fighting terrorists associated with Al Qaida” is stronger language than “serving.” The American people will side more with someone actively fighting a terrorist organization that is tied to 9/11 than with someone who is idly “serving,” like in a way one “serves” a casserole. It’s semantics, but in reporting and journalism, words spin the story."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/weekinreview/24word.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&oref=slogin

Ah yes, "engagement" is much purtier than "killings":



Support these troops? Never. May they fry in hell with their murderous brethren, and the sooner the better.

[acmavm]

1. I agree. I'm VERY sick and tired of this 'support the troops' shit.

Support who? A bunch of thugs who use 'I was just following orders' to justify murdering civilians in a country they have invaded and are illegally occupying? When is it time for them to stand up for what is right and just? When is it time for them to say they won't participate in a bloody invasion and occupation for EXXON-Mobile?

<snip>
McGirk: Is there any investigation ongoing into these civilian deaths, and if so have any marines been formally charged?

Memo: No, the engagement was bona fide combat action. ... By asking this question, McGirk is assuming the engagement was a LOAC violation and that by asking about investigations, he may spurn a reaction from the command that will initiate an investigation.

<snip>

[DemReadingDU]

2. afternoon kick

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Further analysis from the 'Unspeak' blog, which looks at this twisting of language

Via the ever-watchful eye of WIIIAI: the New York Times has printed extracts from a remarkable internal memo from the Marines, written in January 2006, which discusses the right way to frame answers to questions posed by Time reporter Tim McGirk about the Haditha massacre. This is one case in which we can see an answer to the question, recently asked in comments by Ozma, of how Unspeak comes about. The memo was created by the battalion commander and the captain of the company that shot 24 Iraqis — or, as the NYT puts it slightly more fastidiously even in this article, “was involved in the shootings”. (If I rob a bank, it is somewhat euphemistic to say I was “involved in a bank robbery”, as though I could have been the clerk or a hostage.) The officers who produced the document demonstrate an imnpressive sensitivity to language:

...

The public is thus to be reassured that Haditha was a legitimate engagement, even if this seems to imply a hurry to pre-empt any investigation by pronouncing the “engagement” to have been “legitimate” — indeed, to have been an “engagement” in the first place, even though, after the bomb went off, only one side was fighting.

But what about this rather testy response to the word “killings”? Of course military language has long preferred to avoid the verb “to kill” and its cognates (”I prefer not to say we are killing other people. I prefer to say we are servicing the target”).1 But it seems rather a stretch for the Marines to claim they don’t even know what it means — “We don’t know what you’re talking about when you say ‘killings.’” But actually, the memo goes on to admit implicitly that they do know what McGirk is talking about: it’s just that they don’t like it. Because to use this ugly word “killings” to describe, of all things, people being killed — that would be a “misnomer”. The memo does not claim that people were not killed; just that their being killed did not constitute “killings”. Is there a sense in which the journalistic use of “killings” — that particular form of the word — implies something like “murders”? Perhaps: in which case the memo’s resistance is understandable.

What is more remarkable is the metaphor that accompanies it — to use the word “killings” would be to stain the engagement. It is almost as though the romantic sense of the word “engagement”, as of impending marriage, has spilled over into its military use: as though all participants in the event were dressed in virginal whites, which were certainly not “stained”, least of all with blood. A Marine “engagement” is pure and clean, intact of hymen as it were.2 It certainly does not involve anything so fleshly or bloody as “killings”.

http://unspeak.net/stain-the-engagement/

I also find it strange that there is a defensive reaction to McGirk's initial, and seemingly simple, question of "How many marines were killed and wounded in the I.E.D. attack that morning?" (it's characterised as "If it bleeds, it leads"), while later, they're eager to list the American casualties when they don't like the use of the straight-forward word 'killings' ("One of our squads reinforced by a squad of Iraqi Army soldiers were engaged by an enemy initiated ambush on the 19th that killed one American marine and seriously injured two others"). The whole memo really does show they knew that had something that had to be covered up wherever possible, and furiously spun when they couldn't prevent basic facts coming out.