It may be of minor ironic interest that before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cited Amnesty International's reports on Saddam Hussein's violations of human rights as unimpeachable texts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often claimed Amnesty as his ultimate authority. Now, inexplicably, Amnesty has gone over to the side of the devil. (On Wednesday, Rumsfeld assailed Amnesty as "reprehensible" and losing "any claim to objectivity or seriousness." But he admitted that some detainees have been mistreated, "sometimes grievously." Thus, according to the secretary of defense, they were not all "disassembling.")

Bush's press conference talking points apparently did not prepare him to engage particulars of the new Amnesty report: that even after the Supreme Court ruling in Rasul vs. Bush, "no detainee had had the lawfulness of his detention judicially reviewed"; that in Afghanistan, "the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had access only to some detainees in Bagram and Kandahar air bases"; and that "refusal or failure of the US authorities to clarify the whereabouts or status of the detainees, leaving them outside the protection of the law for a prolonged period, clearly violated the standards of the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance." For Bush, it seems, the devil is not in the details.

By training his fire on the new enemy -- Amnesty International, suddenly transformed from a do-gooder into an enabler of evildoers -- Bush seeks to obscure those who opposed the implementation of his torture policy: then Secretary of State Colin Powell, the senior military, the Judge Advocate General Corps and the FBI.

The conflict over that policy has pit Bush's civilian ideologues against much of the military and the national security apparatus. The policy was developed after Sept. 11, 2001, by a small group of political appointees clustered in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel's Office. All were part of the tight-knit network of the right-wing Federalist Society, and shared contempt in principle for international law. These legal cadres produced a stream of memos arguing that the United States was not bound by the Geneva Conventions on torture, that torture even unto death was an acceptable technique, and that the president as commander in chief was beyond the confines of legal restrictions in war.

Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the military's position as well as that of the Department of State, strenuously objected. His legal advisor, William H. Taft IV, argued in a memo on Feb. 2, 2002, that the United States should adhere to the Geneva Conventions because "it demonstrates that the United States bases its conduct not just on its policy preferences but on its international legal obligations." He emphasized that withdrawing from the Conventions in Afghanistan "deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the Convention in the event they are captured and weakens the protections accorded by the Conventions to our troops in future conflicts." But Powell lost the battle.

The application of the torture policy also stirred sharp objections from the Judge Advocate General Corps of the military, whose members are present in the interrogations of prisoners. A delegation of JAG officers brought their detailed information about torture to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The officers were highly agitated that they were being turned into accomplices of a policy they regarded as a violation of international law, contrary to American traditions and potentially threatening to U.S. soldiers in the field. They told Scott Horton, a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler and chairman of the bar association's Committee on International Law, that Pentagon officials were pushing the torture policy and creating an "atmosphere of legal ambiguity." The JAG officers related their alarm that Douglas Feith, the neoconservative undersecretary of defense for policy, had called the Geneva Conventions "law in the service of terrorism." But their uniform objections did not stop the policy.

The latest of many official government investigations into torture -- all of which, beginning with the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib, have documented abuses -- was provoked by the objections of the FBI to incidents of torture its "shocked" agents were forced to observe. FBI agents have now been ordered by the bureau not to participate in this policy. Slivers of the new report, still being conducted by Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt of the Air Force, have seen the light of day as a result of the ACLU suit. The FBI internal memos describe, among other details, shackled detainees who had "urinated or defecated on themselves" and one detainee "almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

In the week before his press conference and as the Amnesty report was released, Bush expounded on his theory of communications. "See," he said, "in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." His statement was an axiom to place alongside that of his chief of staff, Andrew Card, who explained in the summer of 2002, before the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, why there had been a lull in presidential public relations: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

But Bush's statement at his press conference on his torture policy is more than a case study of how his White House markets its "products." It reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of the political dimension of the war on terrorism and his failure to grasp the full range of instruments available to advance America's national interest. Bush imagines that his high-flown rhetoric about the "march of democracy" amounts to international diplomacy, but he has no concern for how people abroad can be expected to react to the continuing reports on torture. For him, any opposition becomes further proof of the righteousness of his cause. Bush has faith that he can dictate what should be perceived as fact even when it collides with facts on the ground. The talking points about his virtue prepared by his staff play to his vanity. But as he postures for the domestic political market, he undermines America's national interest in the world.

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