Is "Disaffirm" a Euphemism?

[Baker, John]

        Charles H. Green, writing in The Huffington Post, has nominated
"disaffirm" as "the new leader in the "Mistakes Were Made" category at
the forthcoming Creative Language awards ceremony," see
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-h-green/mini-madoff-scandal-scale_
b_168486.html.  My question is, why does he think that?

        To give a bit of background:  In the midst of an SEC
investigation into Stanford International Bank and its affiliates, the
bank's lawyer, Thomas Sjoblom, withdrew from representation and sent a
letter to the SEC in which he said, "I disaffirm all prior oral and
written representations made by me and my associates to the SEC staff
regarding Stanford Financial Group and its affiliates."  The SEC
subsequently filed a high-profile civil complaint against those persons,
alleging an $8 billion fraud.  It's been suggested that the withdrawal
and the letter were the trigger for the complaint, implying that the
SEC, at least, considered the letter's meaning to be entirely clear.

        This is the usage that Green thinks is "excusing $8 billion of
malfeasance."  But was it really?  It isn't hard to tell what Sjoblom
meant; he meant that he no longer had confidence in the veracity of his
former clients, and because anything he and his associates had said
about Stanford to the SEC in the past was based on information provided
by them, he could not vouch for its truthfulness.  He could have said
"You should not rely on any past oral or written representations . . .,"
not that this would have been likely to have made Green any happier.

        "Disaffirm" seems to me to be a good a word as exists for
conveying something that needs to be stated in as few words as possible.
Why, then, single it out for criticism?  Is it because it is an
unfamiliar term, and therefore automatically assumed to be euphemistic
bureaucratese?  Or is it simply that, in a large fraud, everyone in the
room looks bad, even those who apparently were themselves deceived and
played a large role in bringing the truth to light?


John Baker

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