Language can be a weapon. One does not need Orwell to point that out. The new speak pouring out of America is frightenting.

IED=WMD?

Why the Justice Department’s charge against the Boston bomber is ridiculous.

BY TIMOTHY NOAH | APRIL 22, 2013

Maybe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction after all.

An 11-page federal criminal complaint charges Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber, with "unlawfully using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction ... against persons and property." The WMD in question was, the document explains, "an improvised explosive device."

Give me a break. Even granting that the language of the law is not the same as the language of everyday speech, it's ridiculous to call the bombs that went off in Boston "weapons of mass destruction." If any old bomb can be called a WMD, then Saddam most definitely had WMDs before the United States invaded Iraq 10 years ago. And if an IED is a WMD, then Iraq actually ended up with more WMDs after the U.S. invasion than before (and isn't entirely rid of them yet).

The linguistic fault lies not with prosecutors but with Congress, which in the interest of expanding prosecutorial powers broadened the legal definition of "weapon of mass destruction" until, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired put it, federal statute could no longer distinguish "dangerous weapons from apocalyptic ones." Under 18 USC §2332a, a weapon of mass destruction might be what it's always been understood to be -- a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. But it can also mean any bomb, grenade, or mine, any rocket with a propellant charge exceeding four ounces, or any missile with an explosive charge exceeding one-quarter ounce. A July 4 cherry bomb, if deployed with sufficient malice, would suffice.

No one minds the hyperbole when it comes to the Boston attacks because the perpetrators of this crime committed an unusually gruesome murder. But the term "WMD" also applies to international relations. Mere possession of WMDs has, in the recent past, been used to justify invading a country and overthrowing its leader. Does the United States really want to put on notice every nation whose military arsenal includes bombs, grenades, and/or mines that they could be next? If we did, our only allies might end up being Andorra, Lichtenstein, Monaco, and the Vatican. (How many WMDs does the pope have?)

This may seem a pedantic point, but the Bush administration used the WMD label to muddy the question of whether Saddam Hussein merely had chemical and biological weapons (a proposition for which it was thought there was much evidence, though it turned out he didn't), or whether he also had nuclear weapons (a proposition for which there was no plausible-seeming evidence even at the time). The confusion level got so high that the New Republic, in an editorial, demonstrated that it had come to think of chemical and biological weapons as the only weapons of mass destruction. The magazine justified invading Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was "the only leader in the world with weapons of mass destruction who has used them." In fact, as I noted at the time, U.S. President Harry Truman had possessed a much more fearsome category of weapon in 1945 and had, ahem, used it. Twice.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/22/boston_bomber_weapons_were_not_wmds?page=full