Reader question:

In this sentence (He will throw me under the bus so-to-speak and try to destroy me), what does “under the bus” mean?

My comments:

“So-to-speak” suggests “under the bus” is a metaphor here, meaning the person (me) is not literally thrown under a moving bus.

So, you can breathe.

OK, if taken word for word, of course, the person thrown under the bus would get run over and really “destroyed”.

But the imagery is unmistakable. To get thrown under the bus is a terrible thing to happen.

What does it mean exactly, then?

It means to be blamed wrongly for some fault, to be made a scapegoat and to be sacrificed.

“The exact origin of “thrown under the bus” is, unfortunately, a mystery,” according to Word-Detective.com, but it may have plausibly come from American sports players boarding their team bus.

Nowadays, professional teams travel by airplane from city to city but in the old days, they usually travel by bus, and there are always occasions when some players are late getting on the bus. Hence, says the Word Detective:

Slang expert Paul Dickson, quoted by William Safire in his New York Times magazine column, traces it to sports, specifically the standard announcement by managers trying to get the players to board the team bus: “Bus leaving. Be on it or under it.”

In other words, get on the bus now, or we’ll leave without you.

“Be under it” is a brutal way of putting it. No coaches desire their late arriving players to be run over by the team bus, of course. But apparently the image of players under the bus is so impressive that it sticks – and various forms of the phrase became widely used in the 1990s.

In short, to throw someone under the bus is to mistreat someone by sacrificing or criticizing them all too severely and undeservedly.

Again, says the Word Detective: “I think the key to the phrase really lies in the element of utter betrayal, the sudden, brutal sacrifice of a stalwart and loyal teammate for a temporary and often minor advantage.”

All right, here are media examples:

1. “Fair Game” director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Swingers,” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”) is apparently not going to get rave reviews from Fox News.

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, the filmmaker's dramatization of how he believes CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, retired ambassador Joe Wilson, were thrown under the bus by the George W. Bush administration and its supporters drew mostly positive marks after its Thursday screening.

The only American film playing in the festival's main competition category, “Fair Game” is set to be released by Summit Entertainment this year.

- Cannes Critical Consensus: 'Fair Game', LATimes.com, May 20, 2010.

2. Never a good sign when coaches throw players under the bus. (Technically speaking, they call it a “motor coach” there … but let’s stay on point.)

So much for “All in it together,” eh?

It is not much of a surprise, however. The pressure is mounting on Arsenal and longtime manager Arsene Wenger as chances of claiming something to hang their hats on for 2012-13 slip away. That’s bad news for Wenger, now creeping slowly toward “embattled” state at the club.

The venerable Frenchman has long had his critics. That’s bound to happen to someone with as many years in one place as Wenger, who is 63 and has been at the north London club since 1996.

While domestic success has been elusive in recent years, Wenger usually does have Champions League to circle on the ledger of accomplishment. (Not winning the thing, but reliably advancing into the competition’s money rounds.) And the club may have another UCL brag or two in them; the Gunners are set to open a high-profile Round-of-16 set against Bundesliga leaders Bayern Munich. Tuesday’s opening leg is at the Emirates.

What does the club’s mindset look like ahead of Tuesday’s clash? Hard to say, but it may not be great. Check out what Wenger had to say about his players following the weekend loss to Blackburn, eliminating Arsenal from FA Cup action:

I think we have a great team, but this shows that we still have to show more maturity on the mental front. We have to understand what it means to win big games, and this was a big game for me.

“I am the first to stand up and say I am responsible for the team selection, but that is not an excuse. If we cannot beat Blackburn like that, I don’t think it is down to the selection of the team.

“The top level is about consistency in every single game and that is what we could not show.”

- Pressure mounting on Arsenal, Arsene Wenger, NBCSports.com, February 18, 2013.

3. A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer has gone public with claims that the George W. Bush administration agreed to an Italian trial of CIA officials for abducting an Islamic cleric in 2003, so that the president and other senior leaders would be protected from prosecution.

Sabrina De Sousa told McClatchy Newspapers that administration officials inflated the threat posed by Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, who was kidnapped by a CIA team in Milan and flown to Egypt, where he was held for almost four years without charges and allegedly tortured.

In November 2009, an Italian court tried 23 Americans, including De Sousa, in absentia for the kidnapping. All of the convicted received jail sentences of seven years, except for Robert Seldon Lady, the former Milan CIA station chief, who had his sentence increased to nine years after appealing.

During the trial, Lady told an Italian newspaper he was not guilty—but also indicated he may have been involved in the abduction. “I’m only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors,” he told Il Giornale.

The U.S. government refused to turn over any of those convicted. Lady was arrested in Panama on an INTERPOL warrant on July 18, 2013, but was returned to the United States the next day.

In her interview, De Sousa told McClatchy:

–Jeffrey Castelli, former CIA station chief in Rome, was the mastermind of the operation, and that he exaggerated Nasr’s terrorist threat to win approval for the kidnapping and misled his superiors that Italian military intelligence had agreed to the operation.

–Senior CIA officials, including then-CIA Director George Tenet, approved the operation even though Nasr wasn’t wanted in Egypt and wasn’t on the U.S. list of top al-Qaeda terrorists.

–Condoleezza Rice, then the White House national security adviser, also had misgivings about the case, especially what Italy would do if the CIA were caught, but she eventually agreed to it and recommended that President Bush approve the abduction.

De Sousa said her claims are based on classified CIA cables that she read before resigning from the agency in February 2009, as well as on Italian legal documents and news reports.

She denied being involved in the kidnapping, although she acknowledged that she served as the interpreter for a CIA “snatch” team that visited Milan in 2002 to plan the abduction.

“I was being held accountable for decisions that someone else took and I wanted to see on what basis the decisions were made,” De Sousa told McClatchy, explaining why she had delved into the CIA archives. “And especially because I was willing to talk to the Hill [Congress] about this because I knew that the CIA would not be upfront with them.”

She added that she did not possess any of the cables, seemingly in an attempt to avoid the CIA going after her for stolen classified materials.

De Sousa is one of only several former CIA officers who have spoken publicly about the Bush administration’s secret rendition operations. It has been reported that more than 130 people were kidnapped, many of whom were tortured at “black sites” in specially selected countries.

Neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has admitted to involvement in the Nasr operation.

De Sousa accused the U.S. and Italy of collaborating in “scapegoating a bunch of people …while the ones who approved this stupid rendition are all free.” She also named the U.S. House and Senate intelligence companies as enablers of the cover-up, given their inaction in response to the information she gave them about the case, and their refusal to treat her as a whistleblower.

“Despite the scale of the human rights violations associated with the rendition program, the United States hasn’t held a single individual accountable,” she told McClatchy. “It’s always the minions of the federal government who are thrown under the bus by officials who consistently violate international law and sometimes domestic law and who are all immune from prosecution. Their lives are fine. They’re making millions of dollars sitting on [corporate] boards.”

De Sousa said she could face prosecution for speaking out. “You’ve seen what’s happened lately to anyone who has tried to disclose anything,” she said. “You have no protection whatsoever. Zero.”

- Ex-CIA Agent Accuses Top Bush Officials of Approving Kidnapping in Italy and then Abandoning those who Followed Orders, AllGov.com, July 31, 2013.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣，編輯：許晶晶）