It was an interesting face-off. Angry senators were demanding to see potentially incriminating administration documents about its torture policies, while the attorney general insisted that was impossible.
Ashcroft said he would not discuss the contents of the Justice and Pentagon memos, and would not turn over the Justice memo to the committee. “I believe it is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from the attorney general that is confidential,” he said.
That was two weeks ago. Suddenly, those interrogation documents aren’t quite as “essential to the operation of the executive branch” as they were before because the White House released them to the media a couple of days ago.
As the fine folks at the Center for American Progress noted, something clearly does not add up.
The release of this document just two weeks later means either: 1) Ashcroft misled Congress about the implications of releasing the documents, 2) the administration impaired the functioning of the executive branch and war efforts for political purposes, or 3) Ashcroft has no idea what he is talking about.
Couldn’t it be some combination of these? I’m going with 4) all of the above.