My note on Facebook on 3/26 about one small point in the Signal Chat affair:
Listening fairly carefully to testimony yesterday in the Signal fiasco, I realized that some of those questioned were not only dodging questions and not recalling stuff but also framing answers so that they were (arguably) accurate, but only with the wording understood in a particular technical way. So that they said there were no war plans — because the plans were, technically, attack plans, not war plans. And that there was no classified intelligence — because the classified information was, technically, plans, not intelligence.
It reminded me of a ritual performed by a Muslim friend at a wonderful dinner at Ann and Bonnie’s in Princeton some 65 years ago (Eqbal and Ann are long dead, but Bonnie in Colorado and I in California squeak by), during which glasses of excellent wine were poured. Eqbal took a napkin, dipped a finger in his wine and flicked a drop of wine onto the napkin, then raised his glass and led a toast to Ann. A while later, we asked him what the flicking was about.
“Oh”, he explained, “the Qur’an teaches us: Thou shalt not drink one drop of wine. I was merely obeying the injunction”.
Weaseling? Further discussion on FB suggested that the Signal testimony (and Eqbal’s wine-flick maneuver) might come under the heading of weaseling — weasel words being mere obfuscation: vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant expressions that nevertheless appear to say something specific and meaningful (It’s often said that I’m a genius).
But weaseling is unclarity, fuzziness. In the Signal testimony and Eqbal’s Qur’anic defense of wine drinking, there’s no obfuscation. Instead, there is equivocation, misleading by exploiting multiple senses or multiple wordings (intending one but appearing to be using the other). Eqbal’s Qur’anic defense is simple equivocation; two senses of not a drop are generally available to speakers of English and Arabic (though without context the ‘no wine’ sense is much more likely than the ‘excluding one drop’ sense).
The Signal testimony equivocations turn on multiple alternative wordings rather than multiple senses: war plans versus battle plans (two types of action plans), classified intelligence versus classified plans (two types of classified information). This way of talking is equivocal, but it’s more devious than that, because the distinction in wording is a matter of technical usage by specialists, involving distinctions that are small and unnecessary for ordinary speakers — splitting hairs, as we say.
So: not weaseling, but hair-splitting equivocation. And infuriating.
March 30, 2025 at 5:07 am |
The FB version of this note has gotten me, so far, 38 reactions, which is by far the most to any of my postings there, ever. I see that Google now labels me as a Public Figure, but I’m clearly one with a tiny (though sometimes enthusiastic) audience. Well, that’s gratifying; I never aspired to be a Great Person, only to be pretty good at what I do, and I understand that I’m an odd duck (for decades people have been telling me they don’t understand why I write the things I do, implicating that I could have done something actually worthwhile with my talents), and I’m comfortable with that.
March 30, 2025 at 5:39 am |
The characters. Bonnie is Benita Bendon, then at Educational Testing Service, now Benita Bendon Campbell and retired from teaching French in a Denver-area private school. Ann is Ann Daingerfield (1937 – 1985), then at the Princeton Language Laboratory, and eventually Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, teaching French at UIUC and linguistics and English as a Second Language at OSU. Eqbal is Eqbal Ahmad (1933 – 1999), then a Pakistani graduate student in political science and Middle Eastern history at Princeton (he earned his PhD in 1965), going on to a career as (according to his Wikipedia page) “political scientist, writer, and academic known for his anti-war activism, his support for resistance movements globally and academic contributions to the study of the Near East”.
March 30, 2025 at 3:08 pm |
Another Eqbalian equivocation, which I neglected to include in the main text, but e-mail today from Bonnie encourages me to append here: