Ends vs. Means Test

I'd always said that when we eventually found out the truth about what happened behind the scenes in the Bush/Cheney Administration, it would be worse than whatever we were imagining. And sure enough, it now appears that Vice President Cheney ordered up a torture program for the personal purpose of beating out a link to justify the invasion of Iraq:

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

There's a longstanding myth, bolstered by movie heroes of increasing amorality over the course of the 20th Century, that the only way to really get anything done is to break eggs, break the rules, break arms. Jack Bauer isn't the first or the worst, he's just one in a chain but the one most seems to inform the Bush/Cheney political era. He's the valorization, with the occasional dramatic flaw, of the ends-justify-the-means rationalization which has just enough grains of truth to tempt. After all, is there any of us who has not, at some point, chosen an arguably less ethical means in order to achieve an end. Maybe you needed a more tranquil result, so you held back information. Maybe you needed a little more time to get something done.

Whatever it was, I'm betting it wasn't on the scale of fixing a policy and then torturing individuals to get a pitchline for it.

So the big problem with a Nixon and a Cheney and their close advisers is that because they have chosen to override the moral compass of our nation based on the simple fact of ego, that they somehow know better than the laws man created to protect the republic, like the dictators of ancient yore, means that they cannot be trusted on anything. Because somewhere in their mind on every key issue is that they know best, the closed mind, the ruthless mind, the despot mind, stuck operating within the diametric structure of democracy, but pushing the edges, blurring the edges, crossing over so much they end up living on the other side.

If you can't trust any key players in that Adminstration about torture and the selling of the Iraq War, then how can you trust them about wiretapping? Or whether they abused the Patriot Act? Or their motives for choosing the head of FEMA? Or their haste to roll back taxes on the rich? Or their desire to privatize Social Security? Or why they fired a Federal Prosecutor? Or why they outed an undercover CIA agent?

It's just at 51% right now, but I wonder if the trickle will grow. We had the wool pulled over our eyes by the ultimate Ends/Means crew: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove.

Will the chorus grow for accountability?