In my non-Tomdispatch life as a book editor, I used to have a modest dream. Every season, editors like me send the galleys of books they’re publishing off, en masse, to likely blurbees, who will, if all goes well, reach for their thesauruses, gather their adjectives into serried ranks, and say the best things possible about the book at hand, soon to be born into such a tumultuously noisy world. That blurb, when it comes in, had better include (your choice): ‘illuminating… much-needed… superb… a must-read… riveting… a bracing antidote to… informative and compelling… analytically rigorous, historically sensitive, and enormously helpful… a stimulating and revelatory work’ — and that’s just from the blurbs on the back of a single book that happens to be sitting by my computer.

But imagine, as I used to, sending the same galleys out to people guaranteed to hate the book. How ‘bracing’ and ‘illuminating’ — and what a selling point — it might be to pepper a back cover with the opposite of the norm: ‘Frankly, I was offended by it… peddling lies… absurd… absolutely irresponsible… one more sign of moral degradation… amount[s] to pro-al-Qaeda propaganda.’ Oh, sorry, that’s not just a dream, there’s a lucky publication in our world that’s already gotten those comments — and from a stellar cast of anti-blurbees! I’m speaking, of course, about Amnesty International’s recently published annual report, which took out after U.S. global detention practices — and the accompanying comments of Amnesty’s General Secretary Irene Khan (who labeled our prison in Guantanamo, ‘the gulag of our times’) as well as those of Amnesty USA’s Executive Director William Schulz, who called for other countries to investigate and indict our leaders.

Amnesty has in recent days been the object of a full-scale, administration-wide verbal assault. The blurbs above, all gathered by the intrepid Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, come from: Dick Cheney (the first two); Condoleezza Rice (but she wasn’t alone: At a news conference, ‘the president used the word ‘absurd’ four times in the course of a 10-sentence response when asked his reaction to a highly critical report by Amnesty International…’); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers (who also referred to Guantanamo as a ‘model facility’); and for the final two gems of antipathy, the Wall Street Journal (‘which often reflects the views of influential hardline policymakers such as Cheney’).

The President and Vice President, in fact, stopped hardly short of declaring Amnesty a terrorist organization. But then that’s their verbal style, which can be summed up as: Reality, to hell with it! Or: You can have reality, we’ve got the jails!

From Amnesty’s point of view, who could ask for better publicity? From the point of view of the rest of the world, these blurbs are like gold, confirming the accuracy of the Amnesty report. (After all, people only scream when it hurts.)

Of course, even in such moments of fabulous (as in some grim fable) departures from the world as it is, one often finds a glimmer of truth — the odd verbal stumble or Freudian slip sometimes telling us more than whole interviews. The President, for instance, offered this little gem in his attack on the Amnesty report at his recent news conference:

‘In terms of the detainees, we’ve had thousands of people detained. We’ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.’

Ah, those detainees trained to ‘disassemble’ who knows what in some verbal chop shop back in Afghanistan. And ah, our President, ‘disassembling’ his own speech that way and then pausing, that glimmer of recognition flickering on his face, and offering a definition for the word he hadn’t quite been able to say, dissembling… ‘not tell the truth.’ (Actually, my dictionary says: ‘To disguise the real nature of; hide with a specious appearance or semblance.’) A reader recently wrote in to suggest that the President’s stumbles of this sort seemed to be signals for his lies — a little like Pinocchio’s lengthening nose.

I assume, by the way, that the FBI agents at Guantanamo who emailed home to their superiors scenes they had personally viewed of the nightmarish treatment of prisoners had, by then, been thoroughly brainwashed by those well-drilled, cleverly disassembling ‘detainees’ (who only looked helpless and tortured). How could the President not be right when the detainees told such obviously ‘absurd’ stories of mistreatment? How about that yarn in which women interrogators smeared menstrual blood on them? Absolutely irresponsible! Oh wait, it turns out to have been true…

But perhaps the letting-the-truth-slip-out award of the week should go to Vice President Cheney for his CNN interview with Larry King:

D. CHENEY: …For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.

KING: They specifically said, though, it was Guantanamo. They compared it to a gulag.

D. CHENEY: Not true. Guantanamo’s been operated, I think, in a very sane and sound fashion by the U.S. military. Remember who’s down there. These are people that were picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan and other places in the global war on terror. These are individuals who have been actively involved as the enemy, if you will, trying to kill Americans. That we need to have a place where we can keep them. In a sense, when you’re at war, you keep prisoners of war until the war is over with.

That use of ‘prisoners of war’ was picked up by an eagle-eyed Tomdispatch reader who sent it my way. Now here’s the interesting thing: This administration has insisted that the prisoners in Guantanamo fall into a category of their own creation. On this they have been adamant: The detainees are ‘unlawful combatants,’ not ‘prisoners of war.’ Although most of them were captured during our war in Afghanistan, they don’t, according to the President and his followers, fall under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, not being ‘prisoners of war.’ But of course the — that word again — absurdity of this has long been self-evident, even, it seems, to the Vice President; and, by the way, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, always leading the verbal way, who in an interview with Bill O’Reilly last December said of the organization Human Rights Watch: ‘That they’ve decided on their own that it is tantamount to quote, torture, and of course that’s a hot button word. It’s tantamount to torture to keep somebody without telling them what, how long they’re going to stay in jail. Well, every war, prisoners of war were kept in, without charges, without lawyers, until the war was over.’

It’s good to see that the Veep and the Secretary of Defense both now recognize, however inadvertently, that a prisoner of war by any other name is still a prisoner of war; brave slips of the tongue, when you think about it, since that recognition might open them up somewhere, sometime, to criminal charges.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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