Strategic leaking on torture

Now this is interesting. A day after a Senate hearing and WaPo frontpager laid the blame for torture at the feet of Rumsfeld and his minions, there is, magically, the appearance of new leaks and a new storyline which also get promoted on the WaPo frontpage.

Yesterday, they tried to blame "officers down the chain of command," but that didn't take,

...top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command...

So, magically, today, it was a lawyer at the CIA who fooled them into the policy.

A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002,....

But some of Fredman's advice was apparently persuasive for top Pentagon officials, who in the following weeks approved the first formal program for harsh interrogations at the facility in Cuba.

See, they weren't going to do it, they really weren't, except that all these people talked them into it. It's not their fault that they wrote the policy, signed off on it, distributed it, and conducted senior staff level meetings on specific techniques being applied to specific detainees including Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.

They were all just tricked. Dupes, you see.......