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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-06-05
© 2010 Peter Belmont
George Orwell invented Newspeak, a language used by bureaucrats to mislead. Orwell would have loved the phrase “targeted assassination” invented, I believe, by Israeli phrase-makers and avidly adopted by American death-dealers.
At first I thought that the evident distinction between “targeted assassination” and “assassination” was intended to indicate new (and additional) precision, care, deftness. The phrase “targeted assassination” called to mind the companion phrase “surgical precision” (used by those who forgot about surgeons sawing off the wrong leg).
But I was wrong. Or misled, anyhow. As intended.
”Targeted assassination” is Newspeak and in fact means “untargeted assassination”. Let me explain.
Formerly (and sometimes today as well), assassins approach the subject of their craft, their intended victim, “up close and personal”, making sure they have the right person, and dealing with him, and with him alone. This is what the (presumably) Israeli assassins did with a Hamas official in Dubai recently. What they did is properly called “assassination”.
But what Israel and the USA do when they aim a guided missile at a car or house somewhere on the calculated (that is to say, on the unverified) belief that their target is inside, is to shoot a large amount of death at a largish target that might or might not contain their intended victim and might also contain a number of other people, the people intended to become “collateral damagees”. If the missile hits a car or house which does not, in fact, contain the intended victim, then everybody vaporized is a “collateral damagee”. This is not a very clean method of destroying intended victims. It is not a very sure way, either.
It is called “targeted assassination” even though, as noted, it may not be assassination at all. If the intended victim is absent, it may be no more than what might usefully be called “multiple murder carried out while bungling an assassination.”
But the phrase is there to protect the “shooters”. They are not multiple murderers at all. No siree. They are professional exponents of “targeted assassination”. Quite another thing altogether.
And sleep better, too. All brought to you by the purveyors of Newspeak.
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