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Examples
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In their infamous torture memos, they so pretzled, abused and redefined the word "torture" that, by the time they were through, whether acts of torture even occurred was left to the torturer, to what had he had in mind when he was "interrogating" someone.
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We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined "torture" out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).
Tom Engelhardt: Don't Turn the Page on History: Facing the American World We Created 2009
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VIEW FAVORITES yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = 'Two Mass Murderers, Two Very Different Stories and Much Hypocrisy'; yahooBuzzArticleSummary = 'A new administration is in power and it has decided to investigate CIA interrogations -- but only those acts by Agency operatives (and its private contractors) that went beyond the bounds of Bush administration extremity, beyond the bounds, that is, of that administration\'s pretzled definitions of what was not torture.
OpEdNews - Quicklink: Two Mass Murderers, Two Very Different Stories and Much Hypocrisy 2009
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We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined "torture" out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).
Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them 2009
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A new administration is in power and it has decided to investigate CIA interrogations -- but only those acts by Agency operatives (and its private contractors) that went beyond the bounds of Bush administration extremity, beyond the bounds, that is, of that administration's pretzled definitions of what was not torture.
OpEdNews - Quicklink: Two Mass Murderers, Two Very Different Stories and Much Hypocrisy 2009
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The amount of space I had to sit in wasn't exactly massive, so I got to Salmon Arm feeling absolutely pretzled.
spectre12 Diary Entry spectre12 2005
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A herd of fathers came barreling at me out of the stands, trying to garnish their pretzled bread, french fries, and nachos with my precious fluid.
amishboy Diary Entry amishboy 2003
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The pretzled development of western water law, for instance, is at least as bizarre as the evolutionary history of the platypus.
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com William deBuys 2012
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If you wanted to describe the Obama administration's bizarre, pretzled relationship with President Karzai and his people, words like "contorted," "confused," and "hypocritical" would have to be trotted out.
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Tom Engelhardt 2011
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The pretzled development of western water law, for instance, is at least as bizarre as the evolutionary history of the platypus.
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com William deBuys 2012
bilby commented on the word pretzled
"It also included an assertion 'that detainees could be transferred to countries known to commit human rights abuses so long as U.S. officials did not intentionally seek their torture.' That's a prescription that has much in common with the Justice Department's infamous 2002 memo that offered this pretzled definition of torture: 'must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death' -- and actually made the definition dependent on the supposed intent of the torturer."
- Tom Engelhardt, Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Missing Prison, 5 March 2009.
March 6, 2009