Growing up, my contemporaries and I had dinned into us the belief that ends do not justify the means. The principle seemed to us as ingrained and natural as breathing.

Not so nowadays, where the precept seems to have been turned on its head. Does a law stand in the way of achieving an objective? Well, then, just modify or skirt the law. The misleadingly titled Military Commissions Act, approved by Congress last year, is a case in point, saturated as it is with provisions that celebrate the triumph of ends over means. Once-cherished concepts rooted in the ends-do-not justify-the-means ethic, long considered inviolate, have been compromised and degraded, if not repealed, by the measure.

Thus, the law scraps habeas corpus for detainees and, in the judgment of the American Civil Liberties Union, allows use of tainted evidence against them. A more apt name for the Military Commissions Act is the Whatever if Takes Statute of 2006.

“Whatever it Takes” is the title of a chilling article in the Feb. 19/26 New Yorker by Jane Mayer about “24,” the highly popular Fox Network drama with an audience of 15 million that extols torture. So compelling is the program’s glorification of torture that Mayer reports a delegation of FBI and military officials. including the dean of West Point, met with producers to complain about its corrupting effect on soldiers and agents who are gung-ho to use the same toxic tactics on prisoners. Mayer reported that, in the delegation’s view, “the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers.”

Nowhere in Mayer’s lengthy article does she state, in so many words, that “24” sends the message that the ends DO justify the means, although it unquestionably does. Perhaps she thought that was obvious. Then again, it may be that belief in the ends-do-not-justify-means adage is so hopelessly passé that it’s not worth mentioning. After all, “24,” with its flatly contradictory theme, was awarded an Emmy.

Mayer points out that George W. Bush has given his seal of approval to the show’s central premise. She wrote:

“The notion that physical coercion in interrogations is unreliable, although widespread among military intelligence officers and FBI agents, has been firmly rejected by the Bush Administration. Last September, President Bush defended the CIA’s use of ’an alternative set of procedures.’ In order to ‘save innocent lives,‘ he said, the agency needed to be able to use ’enhanced‘ measures to extract ’vital information‘ from ’dangerous’ detainees who were aware of ‘terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else.’”

When the president of the United States embraces the idea that the ends do justify the means then you know that those of us who grew up believing otherwise face an uphill battle. You know, as well, that when historians evaluate Bush’s legacy they will find that, for all his religiosity, it was on his watch that Americans turned their backs on a long-standing and fundamental moral principle.