This is usually Onnesha’s territory, but nevertheless, it seems the Justice Department is once again doing wacky things with definitions. Steven Aftergood notices that the DoJ recently indicted three British nationals for conspiring to detonate, quote, a “weapon of mass destruction.” Weapon of mass destruction! Sounds dangerous! Well, was it chemical, biological, or maybe even nuclear? Um, well, no, none of those. But no matter: Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said, “a weapon of mass destruction in our world goes beyond that and includes improvised explosive devices.” Oh, okay then.
It’s funny, one moment we’re told that you have to parse the president’s exact words very, very carefully to discover that he didn’t actually say that Iraq was an “imminent threat” back in early 2003. And the next, words are allowed to mean anything the administration damn well wants them to mean.
