McCarthy Concedes

When even the Cheney-Addington fan writes the following, you have some idea of just how dumb and counter-productive Bush's detainee policy has been:

It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here.  Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo.  Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information.  We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years, and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions.

Does anyone now believe what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have stated as fact: that their administration captured the right people, treated them humanely and brought them to justice? They failed on all three counts. They committed, to paraphrase Talleyrand, a crime and a mistake. We are all less safe as a result.