The widely documented abuses that are referred to in this interview originated not among a few bad apples–the official story–but from the very top. The Bush administration systematically went about creating a “safe space” in which abuse was permissible, up to and including the murder of prisoners (most of whom have been confirmed to be wholly innocent). Book after book has documented this process.

This is the same context within which the Iraq War was waged. When people call this an “illegal” war, they are citing the UN Charter–a standard of international law to which the US is a signatory, which is therefore the law of our land, and as American as apple pie–and the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, conducted by the victorious United Nations after the second world war, which defined a “war of aggression” as:

“essentially an evil thing…to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

In its embrace of illegality as official policy–and thus abandoning any pretense toward “moral legitimacy”–the Bush administration lost the so-called “War on Terror” and the very real Iraq War before they were ever begun. By this standard, McCain’s talk of the need to “win” the war rather than “end” it is predicated on a massive logical and moral fallacy.