While you’re at the WaPo, check out Dana Milbank’s item on the irrelevance of Bush at this point; snarky descriptions of profoundly sad, telling details. After scolding Myanmar on human rights, Laura Bush proceeded to talk about Jenna’s wedding.

(One supposes the surviving Myanmar citizens might be affronted by equating the deaths of 22,000 with Jenna’s wedding, but really — those people shouldn’t be so touchy, now should they?)

Lady Bird Johnson, Jackie O, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, and Martha Washington must be rolling in their graves (!).

I think that Sands was emphasizing, at the end of today’s hearing, the point he makes in the excerpt from his book that ran in Vanity Fair (May 2008) — that Gonzales and Haynes (PR press conference in June 2004) were claiming that both the impetus to use certain techniques at Guantanamo and the legal justification for specific techniques rose up the chain from Guantanamo rather than being imposed from Washington. (Scroll down to “The Authorized Version.”) Sands’ point is that that was not true, that the administration in a sense used Diane Beaver to launder decisions that they had already made, and he has laid that article/chapter out to demonstrate that. Read on to Sands’ interview with Beaver, and you can see that she partly grasps that.

I looked around for more info on her, but I think that Sands’ own article is the best source for now. He isn’t the smoothest narrator I’ve ever read/heard, not in writing nor in speaking either, I have to say. Maybe that’s because he now knows too much, but he is very very substance heavy and transition clipped. I had to read him over and over to get the timeline straight. Och, publishing. (I’m an editor — sorry.)

I don’t know how much it matters now that Beaver was used in the way she was. The simple narrative would go something like this: by the end of January 2002, Haynes and Rumsfeld were already arguing for departures from the Geneva Conventions in interrogations at Guantanamo (and who knows where else). Much of what followed between then and the composition of the official Haynes memo (November 2002) was a game. Addington’s “new paradigm,” prompted by Haynes and Rumsfeld, was signed by Gonzales and passed on to Bush at the end of January 2002. It seemed important to Sands to stress that at the end of the hearing today.

This may get interesting.

Bush may not have those tapes, but only because he’s intentionally run a publicly disclosed communications system (unlike the private and privatized, ueber-sophisticated RNC one) that is full of gaps and mismanagement. Apart from keeping to the Cheney directive to hide everything government does, it breaks the law with every transaction it fails to record. The DOJ stiffs making these arguments should also find another line of work; I’d say in the maintenance or food service industries.

To regard with horror or loathing; detest: “The problem with Establishment Republicans is they abhor the unseemliness of a political brawl” (Patrick J. Buchanan).

Ghod help me, the kool-aid has even leaked into online dictionaries…

Are any of them to the left of Attila the Hun?