"Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration"
About this Quote
A sentence that looks like civics homework turns, in Jane Mayer's hands, into an indictment of power that prefers semantic fog to legal reality. The blunt opening - "Torture is illegal" - isn’t rhetorical flourish; it’s a hard stop. Mayer is doing what investigative journalists often have to do in the wake of national-security spin: restating the obvious because officials have spent years trying to make the obvious sound debatable.
The hinge is the word "So". It signals a suppressed second clause: if it’s illegal, then someone is responsible, and policy can’t hide behind euphemism. In the post-9/11 era, the Bush administration leaned on bureaucratic language ("enhanced interrogation") and lawyerly contortions (narrow definitions of pain, expansive claims of executive authority) to create moral distance. Mayer’s syntax refuses that distance. She doesn’t litigate hypotheticals; she reasserts jurisdiction.
The subtext is also a defense of institutional memory. By adding "and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration", she blocks the audience’s favorite escape hatch: treating torture as a partisan scandal instead of a structural temptation of the presidency in crisis. It’s a warning to liberals not to turn accountability into a retroactive purity test of Republicans, and a warning to conservatives that the law isn’t optional when fear is high.
Context matters: Mayer’s reporting helped map how clandestine practices get normalized through memos, secrecy, and plausible deniability. This line is her thesis in miniature: the law is clear; the narrative war is over whether clarity still counts.
The hinge is the word "So". It signals a suppressed second clause: if it’s illegal, then someone is responsible, and policy can’t hide behind euphemism. In the post-9/11 era, the Bush administration leaned on bureaucratic language ("enhanced interrogation") and lawyerly contortions (narrow definitions of pain, expansive claims of executive authority) to create moral distance. Mayer’s syntax refuses that distance. She doesn’t litigate hypotheticals; she reasserts jurisdiction.
The subtext is also a defense of institutional memory. By adding "and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration", she blocks the audience’s favorite escape hatch: treating torture as a partisan scandal instead of a structural temptation of the presidency in crisis. It’s a warning to liberals not to turn accountability into a retroactive purity test of Republicans, and a warning to conservatives that the law isn’t optional when fear is high.
Context matters: Mayer’s reporting helped map how clandestine practices get normalized through memos, secrecy, and plausible deniability. This line is her thesis in miniature: the law is clear; the narrative war is over whether clarity still counts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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