I never thought I’d agree with John Ashcroft.

Mark Danner has a remarkable article on the Bush administration’s torture policies in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.  Those policies not only were disgusting (and always plainly so to anyone paying attention), but also enormously damaging to our country’s interests both in reducing our moral stature in achieving any chance of genuinely bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice.  I cannot but help save a special contempt, however, for the lawyers who — it is obvious to me in looking at the purported justifications for their conclusions — were obeying orders to come up with any justification, no matter how baseless, for what their bosses wanted to do.  As Danner writes:

[In] the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a “golden shield” from the Justice Department-the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous “torture memorandum,” written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002, which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The “golden shield” presumably would protect CIA officers from prosecution. Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees-”whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning”-in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that “some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.” At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”