Even the White House's own Office of Legal Counsel is now at war with the Bush-Cheney cabal on interrogation. Money quote from the AP:
The high court's ruling in June, in a case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, essentially said that the Geneva Conventions on the rights of wartime prisoners [actually, that should only be Article 3 of those treaties] should apply to the suspected terrorists in CIA custody. That meant that for the first time since the interrogation program was born in 2002, the Justice Department could not give the CIA a written opinion on whether its techniques still were legal. Spy agencies rely on such opinions to justify activities that get little, if any, public scrutiny.
As Marty Lederman explains:
This Administration has been willing to rest its terrorism policies on plenty of unorthodox legal interpretations - such as that that waterboarding is not "torture" - but the ridculous notion that the CIA techniques in question comply with Common Article 3's prohibition on cruel treatment is simply a bridge too far, even for this OLC.
Eventually, even the hand-picked cronies cannot go along with the madness of King George. Thank God that the constitution is not without its allies in the Senate.
(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)