Officials manufacture imminent-threat justifications that security agencies contradict to enable war

Evidence

The Obama administration justified going to war against ISIS on the grounds that it posed an immediate threat to the security of the nation, although security agencies reported that ISIS posed no immediate danger. Despite these assessments, House Speaker John Boehner sounded the alarm: “These are barbarians. They intend to kill us. And if we don’t destroy them first, we’re gonna pay the price” (Fuller, 2014). Heightened fear and wrath over the savage execution of the two journalists provided the driving force to strike back immediately and forcibly. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2466

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the vault’s existing claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy — here the mechanism operates at elite/national level, moral justification overriding factual assessment.
• QUESTION: What exactly is the disengagement mechanism when the justification (imminent threat) is empirically contradicted by the government’s own security agencies? Is it moral vs factual disengagement?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2466