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Hidden away somewhere within the labyrinth of the Pentagon there must be a top secret euphemism department engaged in the invention of the Orwellian surrogate words that have crept surreptitiously into the American English vocabulary and from there translated into many other languages. In my mind I see a unit of studiously serious executives, coffee mugs in their hands and their neckties awry, devising senseless terms for terrible things and used unthinkingly by people today from New York to California, from Maine to Texas. The goal of my imaginary secret unit is to render ugly terms meaningless or to transform them into their opposite. To quote the perceptive Scottish writer, Candia McWilliam, “plain words are always under threat.” There are words that don’t say what they mean and there are words that say what they don’t mean. Intensified or enhanced interrogation sounds oh so much more genteel than the hideous word TORTURE.

The point to keep in mind is that the names of things, issues, objects of life change, but the substance of the object itself remains—torture will always be torture, no matter what the gnomes propose and the media parrot. Today, though generally unknown among the public, the relatively new term, “lily pad”, is making its way forward to describe not that beautiful manifestation of nature but the new version of America’s over 1000 military bases and garrisons spreading across some 150 countries of planet Earth. You can always count on those Pentagon gnomes. They regularly come up with something new. It remains unclear however if they first invent the terms and the military executes their implications or if the military experiments with a new lethal strategy and the gnomes then give it a purified label. In the case of the “lily pad”, this linguistic version of the sheep in wolf’s clothing, was allegedly conceived to spread the U.S. footprint into every corner of our planet and to make military bases more effective and comprehensive while giving the impression that the government is both protecting “our way of life”, while also saving taxpayer money—money then used for more weapons and the hiring of more mercenaries and for payoffs to eager satraps of the Empire’s vassal states; some nations, peoples, and even minor empires can be more easily bought than subdued militarily.