When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.
Here's an amusing and insightful video of Carlin dissecting the language behind Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
The U.S. military seems particularly prone to this habit of using euphemisms to mask reality.
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
Full Essay: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.
"Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description. "Torture" is a conclusion of law applied to the facts that, while there is overwhelming reason to accept that the conclusion is valid for the program as a whole, and many of the specific instances in particular, does not necessarily apply to all of everything that is under the label "enhanced interrogation techniques", and is, in any case, not a legal conclusion that the Committee reached (though the Chair of the Committee, Senator Feinstein, in her introduction to the release, emphatically and directly states as her personal conclusion both that the program involved "torture", and that it involved "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment (both terms being significant in regard to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (including Common Article 3 of the Conventions, which applies to conflict that is not between states-parties to the convention) [0] and the manner in which grave breaches of the Conventions are incorporation into US criminal law as war crimes under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2441 [1].)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Grave_breach...
Such language exists only to obscure the meaning. How exactly do you distinguish an "enhanced" interrogation technique from merely an interrogation technique? Is there any better criterion than saying that an interrogation technique is "enchanced" if it involves torture?
Orwell has a nice essay about this: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
UPDATED: I can't reference Orwell and start sentences with "In my opinion..." :)
Yes, in terms of intensity.
> How about ‘Damaging interrogation technique’?
That's more conclusory than descriptive of the technique, though certainly the whole report (well, the whole several-hundred-page "executive summary") makes that point.
I don't think there is any advantage to adding the emotional weighting associated with the conclusion that the report leads to into the language describing the individual facts. Its more comfortable, perhaps, to people who didn't need the facts to come to the conclusion that the report demands, but I don't see that as an important feature.
I disagree. 'Enhanced' certainly refers to intensification or increase, but also has strongly positive associations. If you experienced two injuries in a row you wouldn't normally say that the second one had 'enhanced your pain experience' - if you did people would assume you were a masochist of some sort. The measure of interrogation is surely in the quality of results it yields; if some technique actually results in a decrease in the quality of intelligence then I'd say it's a degraded interrogation technique.
To the extent that you want a neutral description of an action whose efficacy is unknown, you could say 'aggressive interrogation technique' or 'intensified interrogation technique' or any number of other words. Just because 'enhanced' can be read to mean intensified or increased without necessarily being better does mean it is commonly understood to mean that; when you're choosing terms to describe something to the public - and especially when you're choosing words for their referential rather than explanatory power - that lowest common denominator of meaning is the one that matters.
I appreciate the fine legal distinction that you're drawing here in the context of war crimes and so forth, but I suggest to you that phrases like 'enhanced interrogation technique' are actually part of the problem - deliberate euphemisms chosen primarily for their anodyne qualities.
Are you so obsessed with minutiae of definitions that you are unable to see that both terms describe reprehensible acts performed by people against other people?
"While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured."
They do this for the same reason that when cops shoot civilians they don't say "Then Officer Smith shot the assailant". They say "Then there was an officer-involved shooting.": To use language as a tool to manipulate the viewpoint of the public.
Because there is an 'unenhanced interrogation technique' that is almost but not quite torture.
Never forget that beneath the violation of human rights is a desire to destroy. Calling something 'enhanced' is just another way of saying 'we forked you'.
[1] - http://www.berkes.ca/archive/berkes_1984_language.html
So "These things you did are wrong, I don't care what you want to call them or who said they were legal." The legal debate has important implications for lots of people, but the fine details of it aren't very interesting to the moral debate.