The end does not justify the means
When President Bush yesterday admitted to the existence of CIA secret prisons along with the consideration that information obtained from certain of the imprisoned has since prevented terrorism attacks, I thought I could see in the background Niccolò Machiavelli being introduced as Press Secretary (Minister of Propaganda would be too 1930s to contemplate.).
The thought that hardened terrorists would voluntarily divulge information to Americans about plans they might have painstakingly arranged to bring ill to America does take a bit of imagination.
In fact, the Abu Ghraib abuse which appeared routine as a means of warped entertainment and in reality blatant torture appears to have come of the Guantanamo Bay workbook since the man-in-charge there was brought in to toughen up the regime at Abu Ghraib.
Somehow, we just have found it difficult to believe protestations of Americans about not torturing their prisoners; caught in the web of the broad terror principle and this Machiavellian notion that subscribes to extraordinary rendition, the existence of Guantanamo Bay, the military tribunals and the unwarranted eavesdropping on Americans.
One by one, each of these has been completely discredited if not declared illegal, but we have torturously drawn water from stone as this admission now comes into the light of day.
One more admission is required, by whose authority was the CIA agents shopped to the press?
In all, everything that allows America to maintain the high moral ground in this war on terror has been lost to hubris and bluster, the former is the delusional confidence in the projection of American power and the other can easily be championed by Donald Rumsfeld.
Where truly we have been saved from some terrorist attack we are grateful for those mercies, however using the fear of terror to justify actions and activities that would not stand the scrutiny of basic terms of justice and fairness whilst we are continually stripped of our liberties for the sake of our supposed safety is nasty, unconscionable and Machiavellian – the end will never justify the means.
We have become our own terrorists
Why? Because we become the terrorists we are trying to fight, we deny ourselves the power of our democracies just as the terrorists would have liked to do and our so-called freedoms are rolled back into the bondage of a police state, worse than where those terrorists came from.
As it stands, the only leadership quality America now serves is in having funds and having guns, it is left to others to play the deft hand of real diplomacy in the New World Order.
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