Plain Writing, and Sunshine in Litigation | What is Plain Langauge? | Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell, 1946

“We prevailed over those societies because of our passion for openness, for trusting our citizens more than we empower our leaders. We celebrate our openness. In fact, it is unnecessary secrecy that is timid and cowardly. Openness is courageous. Be courageous. Be as open as you responsibly can,” Ms. Mazer urged.
~ Dir. National Intelligence Insp. Gen. on Secrecy ~

“The major reason, I think, has to do with cultures of secrecy.” Secrets, however, are also political currency. Secrets are power. The obstruction appears to be a mix of disinterest, incompetence, but above all officialdom's enduring love of secrecy for its own sake. Concealment is the trademark of secret policemen. Not democracy.
~ The secret files that still haunt SA ~

______________________________________________________________

Plain Writing, and Sunshine in Litigation

Secrecy News | Steven Aftergood

Secrecy Add comments One way “to enhance citizen access to Government information,” a new Senate bill proposes, would be to require that Government documents “must be written clearly.”

By insisting on plain language in official documents, the bill “promotes transparency and accountability,” said lead sponsor Sen. Daniel Akaka. “It is very difficult to hold the Federal Government accountable for its actions if only lawyers can understand Government writing. As we face an economic crisis and unprecedented budget deficits, the American people need clear explanations of Government actions.”

See “Introduction of the Plain Writing Act of 2009,” March 11. A similar bill (HR 946) was introduced in the House last month.

Another Senate bill tackles the problem of judicial secrecy orders and confidential court settlements that deprive the public of significant health or safety information.

“The Sunshine in Litigation Act is a modest proposal that would require federal judges to perform a simple balancing test to ensure that in any proposed secrecy order, the defendant’s interest in secrecy truly outweighs the public interest in information related to public health and safety,” said Sen. Herb Kohl.

“Specifically, prior to making any portion of a case confidential or sealed, a judge would have to determine–by making a particularized finding of fact–that doing so would not restrict the disclosure of information relevant to public health and safety,” he said.

Speaking of sunshine, next week (March 15-21) is “Sunshine Week,” a national campaign to promote values of open government and freedom of information. Background information and a calendar of events can be found here.

Source: Secrecy News

______________________________________________________________

What is Plain Language?

Plain Language.gov

Plain language (also called Plain English) is communication your audience can understand the first time they read or hear it. Language that is plain to one set of readers may not be plain to others. Written material is in plain language if your audience can:

• Find what they need;
  
• Understand what they find; and
  
• Use what they find to meet their needs.

There are many writing techniques that can help you achieve this goal. Among the most common are:

• Logical organization with the reader in mind
  
• "You" and other pronouns
  
• Active voice
  
• Short sentences
  
• Common, everyday words
  
• Easy-to-read design features

No one technique defines plain language. Rather, plain language is defined by results—it is easy to read, understand, and use.

Why Plain Language?

Plain Language.Gov

We're all busy people. We don't want to waste a lot of time "translating" difficult, wordy documents. Plain-language writing saves our offices time. If we save time, we save money. It's good customer service and reduces the burden you place on the public.

Plain language means your readers can understand your documents more quickly. Readers won't call you so much for explanations. They make fewer errors filling out your forms. They comply more accurately and quickly with requirements. If your customers don't understand your documents, you may have to:

1. Answer phone calls
   
2. Write explanatory letters
   
3. Write an explanatory document
   
4. Litigate

Though no one knows the total cost of poor communication, the information we do have suggests it's high. While writing in plain language isn't easy, it pays off in positive results.

Source: Plain Language.Gov: What? :: Plain Language.Gov: Why?

______________________________________________________________

Politics and the English Language,
by George Orwell, 1946

Plain Language.Gov

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
   
   Professor Harold Laski
   (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
   
   
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
   
   Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
   
   
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
   
   Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
   
   
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
   
   Communist pamphlet
   
   
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
   
   Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like "Marshal Petain was a true patriot," "The Soviet press is the freest in the world," "The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution," are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations—race, battle, bread—dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena"—would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip—alien for akin—making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
   
2. What words will express it?
   
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
   
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
   
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

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. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write—feels, presumably, that he has something new to say—and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
   

2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
   

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
   

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
   

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
   

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Source: PlainLanguage.Gov

Secrecy News: Dir. National Intelligence Insp. Gen. on Secrecy | Secrecy Files Still Haunt South Africa

Future wars and violent conflicts will be shaped by the inabilities of governments to function as effective systems of resource distribution and control, and by the failure of entire cultures to compete in the post-modern age. The worldwide polarization of wealth, afflicting continents and countries, as well as individuals in all countries, will prove insurmountable, and social divisions will spark various forms of class warfare more brutal than anything imagined by Karl Marx.

Basic resources will prove inadequate for populations exploding beyond natural limits, and we may discover truths about ourselves that we do not wish to know. In the end, the greatest challenge may be to our moral order.

Resource scarcity will be a direct cause of confrontation, conflict, and war. The struggle to maintain access to critical resources will spark local and regional conflicts that will evolve into the most frequent conventional wars of the next century. Today, the notion of resource wars leads the Westerner to think immediately of oil, but water will be the fundamental need of some states, anti-states, and peoples. We envision a need to preserve rainforests, but expanding populations will increasingly create regional shortages of food--especially when nature turns fickle. We are entering the century of "not enough," and we will bleed for things we previously could buy.
~ US Army War College: The Culture of Future Conflict: Overpopulation & Resource Scarcity will be the Direct Cause of Confrontation, Conflict, and War ~

______________________________________________________________

Roslyn Mazer to be ODNI Inspector General

Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News

6 April 2009

The Director of National Intelligence last week named Roslyn A. Mazer of the Department of Justice to be the next Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

What makes this an intriguing appointment is that from 1996 to 2000 Ms. Mazer was the first chair of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is among the most successful classification reform initiatives of the last half century. At a time when agency Inspectors General may be asked to assume greater oversight over classification policy, she brings an exceptional depth of knowledge and experience to the subject.

One of the ISCAP’s functions is to consider appeals from public requesters for release of information that executive agencies have withheld as classified. Under Ms. Mazer’s leadership from 1996 to 2000, the ISCAP declassified information in an astounding 80% of the documents that were presented for its review.

In fact, Ms. Mazer’s ISCAP was so successful in overturning spurious classification claims that the Central Intelligence Agency begged for relief from ISCAP jurisdiction. The CIA plea was rejected in a 1999 Office of Legal Counsel decision. But in his 2003 executive order on classification (sect. 5.3f), President Bush granted the CIA a veto over ISCAP declassification rulings.

In a 1998 speech to a conference of intelligence agency classification officials, Ms. Mazer criticized what she termed “the Lewis Carroll element of classification policy” which leads to “keeping classified categories of information that everyone already knows.”

During the Cold War, “closed regimes found themselves hopelessly and fatally outpaced by open societies, and ultimately collapsed from exhaustion,” she reminded the assembled intelligence officials. “This is the reason why our democracy endures, why we live under the oldest living constitutional democracy, and why we cannot export democracy like bananas to formerly closed societies.”

“We prevailed over those societies because of our passion for openness, for trusting our citizens more than we empower our leaders. We celebrate our openness. In fact, it is unnecessary secrecy that is timid and cowardly. Openness is courageous. Be courageous. Be as open as you responsibly can,” Ms. Mazer urged.

Ms. Mazer will succeed Edward Maguire, the outgoing ODNI Inspector General who presented his own critique of the ODNI in testimony before a hearing (pdf) of Rep. Anna Eshoo’s House Intelligence subcommittee last week (“IG Report Blasts the Director of National Intelligence,” Secrecy News, April 2, 2009).

Source: Secrecy News

______________________________________________________________

The secret files that still haunt SA

We are supposedly a democracy, but this country's cloak and dagger past remains a major part of its present and future, writes Bryan Rostron

You discover that you're married to someone you’ve never met; worse still, dead. South Africans can find themselves trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare if information held by the state is incorrect. But imagine those records were compiled by secret police.

Mysteriously you’re stymied at every turn, never allowed to know why. It’s also a form of identity theft.

This, in effect is whats happened to many of our most toxic secrets from the past.

They’re still buried in files and our new rulers seem almost as devoted as the old regime to keeping those apartheid-era records as far from our gaze as possible.

“I don’t think we are doing very well, frankly,” says Verne Harris, director of the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory.

“The major reason, I think, has to do with cultures of secrecy. There’s a deadly mix of old apartheid personnel – there are still many strong pockets of them – mixing with the culture of secrecy associated with the liberation (movements) under ground and (in) exile. There’s a meeting of minds between those old and new spooks.”

Intelligence agencies of the democratic era have for years played a cat-and-mouse game with archival experts about the whereabouts, even the existence, of apartheid era security documents.

In many instances, they have simply lied.

Thus no one has any idea of the extent of material available to examine the full history of apartheid. In some cases, the existence of huge caches of vital security agency documents have only been revealed by inadvertent bureaucratic slip-ups.

“The recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) was for an archival audit, but that never happened, so we simply don’t know what documents are out there,” says Piers Pigou, the director of the South African History Archive (Saha)

“But Saha has been able to establish that the military withheld 90 percent of their documents from the TRC, and we found that out entirely by mistake. We asked for three file serious that we knew about and a clerk unwittingly replied: ‘No we have 42 file series.’”

“Vast quantities of incriminating state records were shredded or incinerated in the dying days of the National Party government.”

In their seminal book Unfinished Business – South Africa, Apartheid and Truth, Terry Bell and Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza state, “In little more than six months in 1993, while political parties of the apartheid state negotiated with the representatives of the liberation movements, some 44 metric tons of records from the National Intelligence Service alone were destroyed. There was so much material that state incinerators could not cope; the furnaces of private companies, such as steel maker Iscor had to also be used. Into these flames disappeared the last vestiges of the voices of thousands of victims.”

Grotesquely, the old regime was not the only authority prepared to obliterate precious documentary records of our recent past.

“In 1996 I as part of a team that walked into a room where both old and new spooks were systematically destroying records of the old Bophuthatswana Intelligence service – a year after Nelson Mandela had ordered a moratorium on destroying documents,” recalls Verne Harris.

The Saha endured years of official “lies, denials and obsfuscation” trying to trace 34 boxes of TRC files, some of which were regarded as highly sensitive, like that of murdered envoy Dulcie September in 1988. Finally, after much duplicity and denials, the Ministry of Intelligence Services admitted possession and – after a three year legal battle – the files were transferred to the national archives. Half of these files are now in the public domain.

The other half can only be accessed through official applications which, claim archival experts, is effectively a “brick wall”

So what is going on? This is not simply a matter of drawing a line under the past. After all, many of those mentioned in the files are still living and, theoretically, have a right to information about themselves.

Secrets, however, are also political currency. Secrets are power.

There will also be compromising information in the files, not only about the nefarious activities of apartheid officials, but about the ambiguous role of some libeation “heroes” as well, possibly even high ranking current politicians.

Speculation about Joe Modise, the deceased former minister of defense, for example, continue to surface, while Peter Makoba, the later former youth leader who made “admissions” during an ANC security investigation, is still treated as a hero in ANC mythology.

The sad truth is that both the old and new bosses have a vested interest in keeping the past hidden.

The paranoia within the ANC, expecially in exile, is well documented. Much of this culture of secrecy and suspicion seems to survive and thrive today. The debacle over allegations by Mo Schaik that Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy, and the subsequent enquiry which exonerated him, revealed much of this festering, unresolved paranoia.

"Rumour, gossip and insinuation seeped into the inner machinery of the movement, stopping initiatives in thier tracks, always raising questions," wrote Padraig O'Malley in his book Shadows of Difference.

"This was the inevitable result of the movement's having been infiltrated by South African agents, at all levels, and its own awareness of its limited capacity to keep them out."

O'Malley adds: "So deeply had the enemy penetrated the ANC that when the ANC, with the assistance of its own moles in the SB (Special Branch), turned on itself to weed out 'suspects' it did so with the ruthlessness the SB admired. In the process, errors were made, individuals and families ruined, careeers brought to abrupt halts."

"There was a brief, golden era of openness, but since 1999 there has been a distinct closing down," says Verne Harris.

Other countries, mostly former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, faced similar dilemmas in the transition from repressive regimes and each dealt with them differently.

Some countries not wanting to destablise national reconciliation, kept secret police files closed for years. Yet this frequently led to a proliferation of rumour and smears -- which, without access to records, could be neither substantiated nor dismissed. Gradually most former Soviet satellites began to open up secret records under a process known as "lustration", taken from the Latin word for ritual purification.

In Poland there are constant new revelations. Last year the Archbishop of Warsaw stepped down after admitting to being an informer during the Communist era. Even Lech Walesa, the founder of Solidarity and Polands first democratically elected President had to fight charges that he'd been a collaborator. He was cleared, but the taint lingered.

For many former dissidents information in their secret files was extremely painful: perhaps their husband, wife or lover had been informing on them.

Others had to fight for years to clear their names. One of the best known Czech dissidents is Jan Kavan, whose exploits in smuggling material in and out of Prague were legendary. After the Velvet Revolution, Kavan became an MP.

Then it was discovered that his 500-page secret police file claimed that, while he was the London representative of the Union of Czechoslovak Students, he held meeetings with an attache at the embassy who was an agent of the STB, the Czech equivalent of the KGB.

Kavan refused to resign and, after seven years of court cases, cleared his name.

In fact, one counter allegation in the Czech Republic is that some right-wing politicians, many of whome took no part in the resistance against Soviet tyranny, used STB files to make highly selective leaks to smear more liberal politicians, most of whom had been anti-Soviet dissidents like Kavan.

The problem, clearly, is how far can any secret police document be trusted?

"A key difficulty is how much credence one gives to the content of such files -- and to be sensitive to concerns over privacy and confidentiality," agrees Pigou. "I believe the critical factor, however, is a competent information approach that can balance the need for openness with appropriate exemptions.

"At Saha we recognize there is such a thing as a legitimate secret -- we just don't feel that those making these vital decisions in South Africa employ an appropriate balance in their overall attitudes about access," he said.

Personal files that have come to light in South Africa reveal some of the crudity and ignorance of security police judgements.

Barry Streek, the late jounalist, accessed his record (File 3016), to discover a 1971 recommendation, signed by the minister of justice, urging that he be restricted without delay on the basis that: "Streek is clearly a supporter of communism. His whole ideology is one of opposition to and the undermining of the current authority."

In addition to suspect, unnamed sources, there are also the dubious motives of the security handlers themselves. There is always a temptation to build a case (and their own reputation), not to mention the possibility of personal animus. In former Soviet satellites it has been shown that, as Communist regimes crumbled, secret police deliberately and maliciously placed "poison pills" in dissidents files, knowing that later this could ruin their reputation.

Perhaps the most sensational case in Poland, after secret police files were fully opened in 1995, was that of Malgorzata Niezabitowska, a goverment spokeswoman and former Solidarity leader. She denied collaboratinig and insisted she had only been interrogated once for six hours.

"The core of the system was a lie and the systems executors were professionals," said Niezabtiowska. "The knew very well how to make lies look like truth, by mixing both in words and in documents."

A court verdict later ruled she had been registered as a spy but that there was no evidence she was aware of this fact. Clearly there is a great deal of ambiguity contained in all secretive documents.

The first, most complete, revelations were from East German Stasi files after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A major reason for this is that the collapse of the East German regime was rapid and total. West Germany virtually took over, it was like a successful invasion. In most other countries, South Africa included, there's been a more fraught transition: many sensitivities -- and therefore secrets -- had to be balanced and placated. Yet how can we continue, 15 years after our first democratically elected goverment, to accept this protracted silence about so many apartheid-era documents?

The obstruction appears to be a mix of disinterest, incompetence, but above all officialdom's enduring love of secrecy for its own sake.

Pigou points out: "Our Freedom of Information Act is premised on the right to access, except in specific cases. But most bureaucrats consider us an irritation and their starting point tends to be, 'we have no intention of giving you this information... and you can go blue in the face to make your point.' That's not how it was meant to be.

Concealment is the trademark of secret policemen. Not democracy.

Brian Rostron's new novel Black Petals (Jacana) is about a South African archivist who stumbles across a surveillance file on himself -- and doesn't recognise this person at all.

Source: The Sunday Independent, March 15 2009: Sunday Dispatches: Page 13: The Secret Files that Still Haunt SA, by Bryan Rostron