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The American public has in the past few years accepted two programs of violence that lack legal, political, and ethical justification. The responsibility for America's unjustifiable transgression of Iraq's borders and the transformation of the United States into a torture society lies not only with the Bush White House, but also the American people who supported those policies of violence for which the administration proposed flimsy and often transparently false rationalizations. The question addressed by this essay is: How can we understand the acquiescence of the citizenry in these blatant violations of international law and universal ethical values?
The Iraq War was justified on two grounds: Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the bombing of the World Trade Center. When the Bush administration began a propaganda campaign to “sell” an invasion of Iraq (e.g. Rich, 2007), the public quickly and overwhelmingly supported the invasion. Despite the fact that the 9/11 commission announced in 2004 that it found no evidence of any relationship between Hussein's regime and the Islamic terrorist group, as recently as 2006, 64 percent of the American public held the view that there was a “strong connection” between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Moreover, no WMD were ever found, and the United Nation (UN) inspectors concluded none had been there for years before the invasion.
Furthermore, detention centers, such as the sites at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base, in which people are held indefinitely without being charged with crimes and denied due process rights, violate US and international law as well as agreements to which the United States is a signatory. Abundant evidence has been made public showing that torture techniques were used at these sights and routinely at Guantanamo Bay (e.g. Human Rights Center, 2008; Lewis, 2004; OIG, 2004; UN Commission on Human Rights, 2006). So, less than two years after the World Trade Center attacks,