I initially payed little attention to the prison torture mess becasue, as I was told by the administration, it made sense to me that this was little more than some soldiers being very very stupid. Certainly the administration would not allow anything that approaches that from which we liberated. Even something that, if it got out, gave such an impression, however misplaced...we're much too smart for that. So I thought.

But the Times editorial today traces well my mounting concern.

But disturbing disclosures keep coming. This week it's a legal argument by government lawyers who said the president was not bound by laws or treaties prohibiting torture.

Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top of this administration.

...

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke into public view, the administration has contended that a few sadistic guards acted on their own to commit the crimes we've all seen in pictures and videos. At times, the White House has denied that any senior official was aware of the situation, as it did with Red Cross reports documenting a pattern of prisoner abuse in Iraq. In response to a rising pile of documents proving otherwise, the administration has mounted a "Wizard of Oz" defense, urging Americans not to pay attention to inconvenient evidence.
...
The brief cynically suggested that because the president is protecting national security, any ban on torture, even an American law, could not be applied to "interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority." Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt reported yesterday in The Times that the document had grown out of a January 2002 Justice Department memo explaining why the Geneva Conventions and American laws against torture did not apply to suspected terrorists.

The editorial makes hints, but not clear arguments, that all of this points to a moral problem in George Bush. Namely, the editorial criticizes the slippery definitions of just what is legal in these prisons during interrogation. When Ashcroft assured Senators that Bush did not order torture, what...after these memos that play with the meaning of that word...did he mean?

And a bone: does it make common sense that, when what we went in there to find wasn't found (those crazy lil mass destuctors), that, perhaps, we might have wanted to turn up the heat on those that keep saying 'we don't know of any hidden weapons."?