Time & Perspective Quote by Dennis C. Blair

Blair’s sentence is built like a moral shrug dressed up as institutional loyalty: a careful performance of distance without accountability. The opening clause, “I like to think,” is doing heavy lifting. It frames opposition to “those methods” as a private self-image rather than a firm judgment. It’s a prophylactic against certainty: he can signal personal discomfort while avoiding the friction of outright condemnation.

Then comes the key pivot: “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time.” That phrase “at that time” isn’t just temporal; it’s rhetorical. It invites the audience to treat the post-9/11 era as an exceptional weather system where normal ethical standards were suspended, and where blame dissolves into atmosphere. The result is a kind of retroactive absolution for policymakers, packaged as empathy for hard choices.

The final clause is the most consequential: “I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.” Here Blair draws a bright line between decision-makers and implementers only to protect both. The appeal to following orders echoes a long, uncomfortable history in which legality and morality are quietly decoupled. He’s not defending the acts on their merits; he’s defending the chain of command as a civic sacred object.

Context matters: as a senior public servant in the national security world, Blair is speaking to multiple audiences at once - worried operators, risk-averse politicians, and a public divided between fear and principle. The intent is stabilizing: preserve institutional cohesion, limit backlash, and keep the past from becoming a prosecutable argument about the present.