Intimidating the Press

"'The "culture of abuse" theory has no reliable evidence to support it,' Mr. Yoo wrote. He noted that several military investigations had found that what he called 'the appalling abuses' at Abu Ghraib were not authorized by any military policy."

Why Was It Classified for So Long?

Steven Aftergood blogs for the Project on Government Secrecy that "the document itself exemplifies the political abuse of classification authority. Though it was classified at the Secret level, nothing in the document could possibly pose a threat to national security, particularly since it is presented as an interpretation of law rather than an operational plan. Instead, it seems self-evident that the legal memorandum was classified not to protect national security but to evade unwanted public controversy.

"What is arguably worse is that for years there was no oversight mechanism, in Congress or elsewhere, that was capable of identifying and correcting this abuse of secrecy authority. (Had the ACLU not challenged the withholding of the document in court, it would undoubtedly remain inaccessible.) Consequently, one must assume similar abuses of classification are prevalent."

Addington Watch

In a major and timely story in Vanity Fair, Phillipe Sands writes about the relationship between top Bush aides, the coercive interrogations at Guantanamo, and the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

"The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a 'trickle up' explanation. . . . This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration -- by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees -- lawyers -- who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option."

The first victim of what most of us would call torture was Mohammed al-Qahtani, allegedly a member of the 9/11 conspiracy, and a prisoner at Guantanamo.

Writes Sands: "On September 25, [2004] as the process of elaborating new interrogation techniques reached a critical point, a delegation of the administration's most senior lawyers arrived at Guantanamo. The group included the president's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales . . . ; Vice President Cheney's lawyer, David Addington . . . ; the C.I.A.'s John Rizzo . . . ; and Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld's counsel. They were all well aware of al-Qahtani. 'They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,' [the former military commander at Guantanamo, Major General Michael E. Dunlavey] told me, 'and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.' I asked what they had to say. 'They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C.,' Dunlavey said. . . .

"[Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantanamo,] confirmed the account of the visit. Addington talked a great deal, and it was obvious to her that he was a 'very powerful man' and 'definitely the guy in charge,' with a booming voice and confident style. Gonzales was quiet. Haynes, a friend and protege of Addington's, seemed especially interested in the military commissions, which were to decide the fate of individual detainees. They met with the intelligence people and talked about new interrogation methods. They also witnessed some interrogations. Beaver spent time with the group. Talking about the episode even long afterward made her visibly anxious. Her hand tapped and she moved restlessly in her chair. She recalled the message they had received from the visitors: Do 'whatever needed to be done.' That was a green light from the very top -- the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the C.I.A."

Dahlia Lithwick writes for Slate: "Someday, when we look back at the Bush administration's 'war on terror,' we'll be unable to point to the 'bad guys' because they will turn out to be a bunch of attorneys in starched white button-downs, using plausible-sounding legal analysis to beat precedent and statute and treatise from ploughshares into swords. And not one of them will be held to account."

Lithwick writes that "the Bush solution . . . seems to be to hire lawyers who don't believe in the law."

The Invisible President

Sherly Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: "For a man who came into office as the nation's first M.B.A. president, Mr. Bush has sometimes seemed invisible during the housing and credit crunch. As the economy eclipses Iraq as the top issue on voters' minds, even some Republican allies of the president say Mr. Bush is being eclipsed and is in danger of looking out of touch. . . .

Stolberg also notes that "because the public has little faith in Mr. Bush, it may be tough for him to be the point man on the economy, even with a Harvard business degree. Just 25 percent of the public approves of the way Mr. Bush is handling the economy, a figure even lower than his overall job approval rating, a CBS News Poll in mid-March found."