It comes as hardly a surprise that the President is a liar, and that he lied about perhaps the most fundamental grievance against the legitimacy of American foreign engagement during his administration. The only way for the gentleman not to be a liar (“We don’t torture.” – Bush 2006), is to conclude that inducing drowning in a prisoner is not torture. Unspeakable violence will occur in war, human rights will fall victim to the imperatives of victory, and just ends will be achieved by callous means, but opening the door to torture as policy is the gravest of threats to American moral stature. Not surprisingly, machinations are shifting gears in order to obscure the thing at hand with the same fear mongering and fetishization that has accompanied the administration’s triumphalism since that fateful day. The defense of the practice, and it rests upon the feeblest of foundations, combines the loosest grasp of reason with the highest degree of false expectations.
A theme repeated with enough regularity to indicate a specific underlying rhetorical intent is the idea that, in the absence of another catastrophic attack on American soil, administration security policy (including the invasion of Iraq and “enhanced interrogation”) ought to be credited. While it is dangerous to make sweeping statements on the matter and risk generalizations (despite certain practical conclusions about the President’s policies), the administration is still able to offer little more than post hoc ergo propter hoc justifications of its success. Such false causality leads to (or, more likely, is the product of) “bad policy and a prayer”, wherein the predominant need for reality to conform to certain hopes, perceptions, or expectations is allowed to break the acknowledged causal links between means and ends.
When the relationships between cause and effect specifically, and between means and ends generally, become distorted, accountability suffers from a subordination to groupthink. The ability to do, “can”, begins to take precedence over the prudence of doing, “ought” or “may”, and within short order it is the means that are justifying the ends despite empassioned insistence upon the opposite.
