Jack Balkin connects the dots: If large numbers of administration lawyers were aware of the torture memo, and if (as I speculated) one of the motivations for it was retrospective justification of CIA methods, e.g. refusing pain medicine to someone shot in the groin, then something is indeed rotten in the SG's office:
Now go back and reconsider this exchange in front of the Supreme Court, two years later, on April 28th, 2004 in this light:
when
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement
in the Hamdi cases whether judicial review should be foreclosed even in
cases of alleged torture, Clement dodged the question. “Our executive,”
he insisted, doesn't engage in torture. “Judicial micromanagement” was
inappropriate in wartime; “you have to trust the executive.”
Meanwhile the unnamed leakers are out in force complaining that their hands are tied by 'uncertainty' about how much pain they can inflict, and as a result that torrent of intelligence we were previously enjoying is now just a little trickle. Given the very high quality of recent intelligence (something that the NYT's article on its Officially Sanctioned Leak just somehow neglects to mention), I am very very sceptical indeed about this planted story.
You know, it's getting to the point where I'm actually wondering why I subscribe to the New York Times…
