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George W. Bush has effectively legalized torture by the U.S. government. Waterboarding, simulated drowning, is but one of the many torture techniques that Bush has authorized. He justifies permitting abusive interogation techniques on the grounds that it may be the only way to get information that might save lives. The only why to justify such actions is to believe that the ends justify the means. He has given himself, as president, the exclusive right to determine what is permitted or not, although he is not a judge and never has been one. Perhaps the fact that his father is a past president is a factor in making him believe that as president, he should have extraordinary and extralegal rights. It is precisely the type of imperious attitude that our American founding fathers warned usd against and that caused our forefathers to revolt against King George of England.

The tortuous techniques sanctioned by Bush must be seen in the context of the 9-11 attack, which itself must be viewed in the context of never having been thoroughly investigated. The neo-conservative "Project for a New American Century" promoted the need for a new "Pearl Harbor" in order to pursue activist foreign interventions and avoid Constitutional and civil rights legal trouble. The content of the Patriot Act and war against Iraq have been shown to have been under preparation long before 9-11. Was it intentional or just propituous according to neo-con orthodoxy? In any case, Bush proclaimed a "War on Terror" and in order to prosecute his war, he decided that he needed to utilize special private jets to transport suspected terrorists to their countries of origin in order to facilitate use of unorthodox interrogation methods to garner information about future terror plans. Eventually, he decided that he preferred to keep many of those suspects so that US officials to get the information directly, regardless of US prohibitions against torture.

If certain techniques were believed to constitute torture according to the definition of the US, UN or other countries, yet Bush felt they were needed in order to have the possibility to get information, he recognized that he needed to create a new legal construct to put his interrogators at ease. Otherwise, they would not perform the extraordinary interrogations.
Professor John Yoo of UC Berkeley was eventually brought in to write secret legalistic definitions to enable "torture" to be redefined to allow anything that did not leave permanent scars. This

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