Management Style Shows Weaknesses

A senior administration official said the report never reached Bush, but was dealt with through "NSC staff-level discussions with the Pentagon."

Outsiders, including some Republicans who speak forlornly about the debacle, said the Abu Ghraib scandal is the price Bush is paying for lacking curiosity and showing unwillingness to delve into potential roadblocks to his larger mission.

Paul C. Light, an authority on bureaucracy who is a political scientist at New York University, said Bush "should have been sharp enough to see the potential damage to the U.S. reputation, if not his own." But Light said that with Bush's approach to governing, an international group's concerns about detainees would have been viewed as "nothing but a rounding error" in the greater goal of fighting global terrorism.

"This administration has been blinded by its hubris," Light said. "The way this group of people operates is to have this kind of echo chamber in which they hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. . . . They have no formal or informal method for challenging themselves, and that is a perfect recipe for this kind of result."

Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal Harvard University law professor who has advised Democrats, said Bush has proven to have better instincts than many people thought when he took office, but he "accepts the most ridiculous and self-serving explanations."

Tribe pointed to a report in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" that during a White House meeting in 2002, Bush raised questions about the intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, asking whether the evidence he had been presented "is the best we've got." The book reported that CIA Director George J. Tenet replied that it was "a slam dunk case," and Bush went on to put his credibility behind assertions that turned out to be false.

"He doesn't seem to have the follow-through and patience that makes it worthwhile to raise the questions," Tribe said.

Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas government professor who has studied Bush throughout his political career, said the administration's slow response to indications of trouble in military prisons reflects "the tendency for everybody to take signals from the president that this is what we need to do and we're not going to let irritants of a lesser nature divert us from our course."

The presidential adviser said that Bush has had the same management style ever since he bought Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers and ran for governor and that he does not expect him to make any significant change despite his current straits. "When he started to use the strong-CEO's approach of delegation and real responsibility and real accountability, that's when he started to succeed mightily, both in business and in politics," the adviser said. "It's impossible to change a successful man."