...the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration -- mainly in the circle that included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Addington. This group had come to Washington determined to implement its theory of "the unitary executive," which holds that presidential powers of all sorts have been dangerously diminished since the Vietnam War. The fact that these guys seem to have defined executive branch power as the ability to hold people in secret and torture them pushes the creepy quotient into areas that probably require psychoanalytic credentials.
Did Carl Schmitt or Leo Strauss seem creepy? They may not be George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but they are first rate political thinkers, only one rank below Machiavelli, who stand behind our neoconservative powers that be. We had better read the realpolitik theorists carefully since we living in a world where Freedom cloaks their purposes. You would not want to sleep through this philosophy class, lest ye never wake.
