Thank God for Blair. Not Tony, Eric. In a world where fuzzy words are dreamed up to hide dirty practices, Eric’s nom de plume George Orwell gave us a template for the perversion of language.
‘Extraordinary rendition’ was one of Washington’s linguistic perversions, dreamed up to hide ‘extraditing for torture’.
Out of the HP shenanigans has emerged another. We all know it’s wrong to ring up an organization and pretend to be someone else in order to extract confidential information.
But two US lawyers advised HP executives that such a practice is legal.
Instead of calling it ‘obtaining confidential information by false pretence’, the lawyers called it ‘pre-texting’.
That Washington and Westminster have succumbed to Orwellianism is sad, but not unexpected when politicians are often adrift from reality.
It’s a lot sadder to see a great engineering company like HP adopt Newspeak.
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