Running In The Shadows

Two linked stories today show the Bush administration in a very harsh light. The first is from the New York Times, which reports:

Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge's order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

The lawyers said in a letter sent to the federal court in Manhattan late Thursday that they would file a sealed brief explaining their reasons for not turning over the material, which they were to have released by yesterday.

And the second is from the Washington Post:

The Bush administration in recent days has been lobbying to block legislation supported by Republican senators that would bar the U.S. military from engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees, from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, and from using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual.

Vice President Cheney met Thursday evening with three senior Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the administration's case that legislation on these matters would usurp the president's authority and -- in the words of a White House official -- interfere with his ability "to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack."

The White(feather) House has even bluntly told the Senate that President Bush's advisers would urge him to veto the $442 billion defense bill if the proposed legislation is presented.

Andrew Sullivan calls the Bush administration out on this one:

Why would the Bush administration want to retain the option to use "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of detainees? They don't support torture, do they? The amendment would simply bring order and law to what has been a free-wheeling and disastrously inept detention policy, made up by Bush officials as they went along. It beggars belief that, after Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo and the dozens of deaths in interrogation that the administration wouldn't want some way out of its own impasse. But no: as so often, it sticks its heels in, and refuses to acknowledge an obvious and terrible mistake in the war. I look forward to the hard right describing McCain as a leftist or unpatriotic because he wants to restor America's reputation as a country that acts ferociously but always humanely in its own defense.

I would go further though. These stories show, at least circumstanially, that complicity in, approval of and orders for inhumane treatment and questionable detention go to the very top of the admninistration. They are now running frantically to cast shadows over every possible avenue whereby their criminal actions might come to light. I too look forward to seeing the hard right try to be apologists yet again for an administration which is simply not worthy of the country which elected it.