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Act (Washington, DC: American Civil Liberties Foundation, 1990), pp. 42–44.
13. Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 69–71.
14. Ibid., pp. 46–47.
15. John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars (New York: Morrow, 1986), pp. 20–21.
16. Ibid., pp. 20, 27–29.
17. U.S. National Security Council, NSC 4: Coordination of Foreign Information Measures
(confidential), December 9, 1947, RG 273, U.S. National Archives, Washington, DC.
18. Edward Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953).
19. U.S. National Security Council, NSC 4-A: Psychological Operations (top secret), December 9,
1947, RG 273, U.S. National Archives, Washington, DC.
20. U.S. National Security Council, NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects (originally top secret,
now declassified), June 18, 1948, RG 273, U.S. National Archives, Washington, DC.
21. Intricate and seemingly contradictory conceptual structures of this type are far more common in
affairs of state than is generally recognized; indeed, they are probably inherent in modern political
communication systems. A particularly grotesque example of this can be seen in Nazi Germany’s
sublanguages used to manage the extermination of Jews. There, the state employed massive public
information campaigns to mobilize the German bureaucracy and public for persecutory operations
such as expropriation of Jewish property, “petty” (i.e., nonlethal) discrimination, and mass roundups
of Jews for deportation. The truth—that the deportees were to be murdered—was aggressively
denied by the Nazi information authorities, however, who claimed that the deportees were simply
being relocated to work camps.
But despite the denials, small armies of personnel were required to actually manage the death
camps, deliver the railroad shipments of Jews, make use of data derived from fatal experiments on
work camp prisoners, and so on. These groups soon developed complex, specialized vocabularies of
euphemisms and rationalizations in order to discuss their work without directly contradicting the
official claim that deported persons were surviving and even prospering.
In time, knowledge of the exterminations seeped through German society, spread by rumors, jokes,
foreign radio broadcasts, and the accidental revelations inherent in any large-scale program. The net
result was both widespread knowledge of the genocidal efforts of Hitler’s government and,
simultaneously, an institutionalized and internalized denial of precisely the same knowledge. For
many Germans, this belief structure proved to be quite ornate and resilient.
Roughly similar psychological and linguistic structures seem to have played a role in certain
phases of Turkish Ittyhad efforts to exterminate Armenians during World War I, in atrocities during
Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, and in U.S. exploitation of former Nazis in intelligence operations.
There are many obvious differences, of course, between the psychological and linguistic dynamics of
atrocities and those of psychological warfare projects. Nonetheless, there are enough similarities to
suggest that euphemistic “cover stories” are integral to much of modern political communication.
22. U.S. National Security Council, NSC 10/2 On the importance of euphemism during mass
crimes, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Harper, 1961), pp.
216, 566, 652.
23. Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, p. 33.
24. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence, 94th Cong.