Justice & Law Quote by Jane Mayer

Mayer’s sentence is doing the careful, prosecutorial work of turning a sprawling indictment into a clean chain of accountability. She starts broad, then tightens the noose: “critics of the Bush administration generally” sets a wide frame (human rights as the moral headline), then “in particular” drills down to a more technical, more damning allegation: the “use of science.” That pivot matters. It suggests the scandal isn’t only what the administration did, but how it justified what it did - laundering contested policy through the prestige of empirical authority.

The repetition and hedging are telling. “They are critics” and “generally” signal a journalist’s discipline: she’s attributing, not editorializing. But “very, very critical” is a controlled breach of neutrality, a doubling that conveys urgency without needing loaded adjectives. It implies that even among standard partisan or civil-liberties critiques, this issue hits a special nerve - because science is supposed to be the neutral ground where politics can’t so easily play.

Contextually, the Bush years were defined by fights over torture, detention, surveillance, and the post-9/11 expansion of executive power. Mayer’s subtext is that human rights abuses and distorted science aren’t separate scandals; they’re mutually reinforcing. If you can bend “science” to fit predetermined outcomes, you can manufacture legitimacy for policies that would otherwise read as naked violations. The line quietly reframes dissent as expertise-based, not merely ideological: the critics aren’t just upset; they’re alleging a corruption of the methods that keep power honest.