That George W. Bush was not the smartest man ever to rise to the Presidency is without question. The question is how the very smart people around him could have recommended to him that he do such very dumb things.
This week we learnt that the ideas behind the specific "enhanced interrogation techniques" employed by the CIA came from training the US Air Force put its pilots through in order to prepare them for potential capture by the Chinese during the Korean War. This had the advantage that if we were prepared to do it to our boys then it couldn't really be torture, right? Unfortunately it had the disadvantage that these were the techniques the Chinese used to get American pilots to confess to being capitalist running dogs committed to the overthrow of the glorious People's Republic who repented of their imperialist stance against the workers who would ultimately triumph in the proletarian revolution!!!! In other words these techniques could be used to persuade those upon whom they were employed to say whatever their interrogators wanted them to say.
A little research (some suggest a quick google search) would've revealed this fact to those writing the tor...sorry, enhanced-interrogation manual for the CIA. But they didn't do that research. Why? I think because they found the answer they were looking for–a justification for the methods that many in the administration thought it necessary to employ–and then they stopped doing research. The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm" one CIA official said. (An advisor to Condoleeza Rice said "...the president was entitled to get the most thoughtful and searching analysis our government could muster.” Damn straight, and he didn't get it. Neither here, nor in discussion of the case for War in Iraq.
We live in a world of spin. A world where "it all depends on your point of view". This leads to strong temptation to stop thinking once you've found the facts that support the view you already decided is right. What's missing when you do that is intellectual rigour: the idea that you test your conclusions against all the the data, not just that which suits your case.
The more I thought about this the more I thought that this is what those of us who teach, especially those of us who teach in Universities, can try and contribute to society. Intellectual rigour is tough to practice. It takes effort, and vigilance.
All of us succumb to the temptation to stop probing after we bolster our bedrock assumptions with some reassuring information. Democrats do this as much as Republicans. And academics do it too. But, the advantage we have in our profession is that we are trained, and we spend years practicing, a conversation with peers where we push each other by probing and questioning all aspects of an argument, trying to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the stances we take. While very few people are lucky enough to spend years doing this, everyone who gets to go to College should spend four years doing it. If they don't the University has failed them. And the consequences of that failure will be bad for society at large.
Post-modernism has opened our eyes to the ways in which power determines the facts that are deemed relevant, and how it thereby shapes our understanding of the world. But this does not mean that truth can be completely re-shaped to suit a particular point of view. No matter how much Dick Cheney wanted there to be a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, there just wasn't one. And the way the human brain and body respond under waterboarding were simply not consistent with Bush Administration's officials' pre-conceived notions of what such methods would accomplish. To quote an American President who was rather wiser than the 43rd one, "Facts are stubborn things". They tend to bite you in the butt if you ignore them. Which is why we would all be better served by a polity that practices intellectual rigour, and doesn't just pay attention to what is seen as the necessity of a particular moment in history. As citizens we should demand no less. And we should attempt to practice what we preach.
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