Oh, The Circularity Of It All!

George W. Bush sees no problem at all with torture.

There’s just no way around that conclusion. If you read his book, you’ll see it; if you watched his interview with Matt Lauer last night, you’ll see it. And, of course, he seems perfectly happy to talk about it, convinced as always that he’s entirely in the right.

But, when we look closely at his explanation of why he allowed the use of waterboarding, it isn’t at all clear why he should be so eager to have this conversation.

From the Washington Post:

Interviewer Matt Lauer of NBC News asked Bush why he believed that waterboarding was legal, a topic of significant dispute.

“Because the lawyer said it was legal,” Bush replied. “He said it did not fall within the anti-torture act. I’m not a lawyer. But you gotta trust the judgment of people around you, and I do.”

He has been widely criticized for directing the lawyers to reach that conclusion, on which there is no legal consensus.

In other words, “I asked a team of lawyers to confirm that some forms of torture ought to be considered legal, so long as we changed the way we talked about detainees. When they did so, I felt very comfortable ordering the use of torture on those detainees because the lawyers I’d asked to say it was legal had said it was legal.”

Perhaps you aren’t all professional logicians, but I ask you, nonetheless, can you construct a better example of circular reasoning than that?